We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right.… That we have to become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other – and the memory of our former friendship more sacred. There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included (einbegriffen) as small parts of this path; let us rise up (erheben wir uns) to this thought. But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility (erhabenen Mȯglichkeit)! – Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies (Erden/Feinde).
Nietzsche, ‘Star Friendship’, in The Gay Science2
Up until now. up until now, in sum, and still just a second ago, we were speaking of life’s brevity. How short will life have been, too short in advance, ‘Aber unser Leben ist zu kurz’, says the friend of Stemen-Freundschaft.
Up until now we have been speaking of the infinite precipitation into which an eschatological sentiment of the future throws us. Imminence, a world is drawing to a close, fatally, at a moment when, as we were saying a moment ago, things have only just begun: only a few brief millennia, and it was only yesterday that ‘we were friends’ already.
This is the way fraternal friendship goes. We have just had a hint that fraternal friendship is not without affinity with the history of an ascension. Not a progress but an elevation, a sublimation, no doubt in affinity with what Kant defines also as the stellar sublimity of the moral law (‘the starry heavens above me, the moral law within me’). The profound height, the altitude of the moral law of which fraternal friendship would be exemplary – ‘schematic’ or ‘symbolic’, to use Kant’s technical language, according to whether the figure, the presentation or the hypotyposis of the brother would be related to the understanding or to reason.
This narrative can be told as the history of humanity. Let us be more precise: of a humanization of man that would have been reflected into fratemization.
(As you will have noticed, we have deliberately refrained from recourse to ‘illustrations’ to ‘actualize’ our analyses or in an attempt to demonstrate their necessity today, by delving into the most spectacular ‘news’ on political scenes: local, national, European or worldwide. We have done so through a concern with sobriety: first, we do not want to exploit that which, as it were, screens out reflection by projecting itself with the pathetic and ‘sensational’ violence of images on to a too easily mediatizable scene. Then again, these examples are in the mind, heart and imagination of anyone who would be interested in the problems we are dealing with here; such people, let us hope, will have found the path of these mediations by themselves. Lastly, the overabundance of such ‘illustrations’ would have swamped the least of our sentences. Be it a matter of new forms of warfare, of what is confusedly called the ‘return’ of the ‘religious’, of nationalism, of ethnocentrism (sometimes dubbed ‘tribal’ so as not to put off the other person living with us, at home); upheavals of ‘number’, of demographic calculation in itself and in its relations to democracy, or to a democratic ‘model’ which will never have been inscribed in the culture or religion of an immensely ever-growing majority of the world’s population; unprecedented statistics on what can no longer even be tranquilly called ‘immigration’ and all forms of population transfer; the restoration or calling into question of citizenship in terms of territory or blood; unheard-of forms of theologico-political intervention on a worldwide, inter-or trans-state scale; the refoundation of state structures and international law (in progress or to come, etc.) – the list would be endless: all the themes broached here are, to all intents and purposes, situated at the articulation between these ‘present-day examples’ and the history of problematics that we are striving to reconstruct or deconstruct. But they demand, above all, implicitly or explicitly, a new topic of these articulations. A single example, one that serves as the pretext for this parenthetical paragraph: a rigorous, critical, non-dogmatic definition of what is called today the humanitarian – with its ever more specific organizations, the accelerated multiplication of its interventions, its both continental and international scope, its complex relations with governmental and non-governmental institutions, its medical, economic, technical, militaro-policing dimensions, the new rights that this ‘humanitarianism’ seeks between the usual ‘United Nations’ type of intervention and a right to interfere, to invent, etc. – all of this demands a conceptual and practical reformulation. But this cannot be done without a systematic, and deconstructive, coming to terms with the tradition of which we are speaking here. For example, what would the definition of ‘humanitarian’ be in its unheard-of forms with respect to what Kant calls – let us recall – ‘the friend of man’, a concept Kant intends to keep separate from that of the ‘philanthropist’? In what respect does the humanitarian participate in this process of fraternizing humanization that we are questioning here? Another question: what would be today, in a new system of law, a crime against humanity? Its recent definition is no longer sufficient. It will be said that the question is very old, and this is true, but it is also as new, still intact, pregnant, replete, heavy with a future whose monstrosity, by definition, is nameless.3)
Hence, the categorical imperative: not to betray humanity. ‘High treason against humanity’ is the supreme perjury, the crime of crimes, the fault against the originary oath. To betray humanity would be to betray, quite simply, to fall short of virtue – that is, short of the virtue of fraternity. In that humanity, one should never betray one’s brother. Curse or speak ill of him. Another way of saying: only the brother can be betrayed. Fratricide is the general form of temptation, the possibility of radical evil, the evil of evil.
Kant reports elsewhere, another time, Aristotle’s saying. In the canonical version, of course, with the vocative and the exclamation mark: ‘Meine lieben Freunde: es giebt keinen Freund!’ And he will tell us a story, to get us to give credence to a sort of crime against humanity.
As we were suggesting a moment ago, it is indeed a matter of anthropology, and of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Its ‘didactic’ speaks to us of appearance, of this appearance authorized and even recommended by morality. Deceptive appearance is not as bad as all that, is not always inadvisable, Kant concedes. Nature was wise enough to implant in mankind a felicitous aptitude for being deceived. Certainly illusion does not save virtue, but in saving appearance, illusion rendets virtue attractive. Proper exterior appearance commands consideration: ‘an appearance which is not demeaning to associate with’, sich nicht gemein zu machen, Kant writes, thinking again of women, of course, and adding immediately afterwards, as a first example: ‘Womankind is not at all satisfied when the male sex does not appear to admire her charms.’4 To which – strict as he always is, careful to select the Latin designation which will speak the law of the concept – he adds a reserve, the reserve of reserve – modesty, pudicitia: ‘Modesty [Sittsamkeit] (pudicitia), however, is self-constraint which conceals passion; nevertheless, as an illusion it is beneficial (als Illusion sehr heilsam), for it creates the necessary distance between the sexes so that we do not degrade the one as a mere instrument of pleasure (zum blossen Werkzeuge des Genusses) of the other.’
Modesty has the virtue of saving the other, man or woman, from its instrumentalization, from its degradation to the rank of means in view of an end – here, enjoyment. Keeping us away from the technical, from the becoming-technical of desire, modesty is therefore eminently moral and fundamentally egalitarian. Owing to modesty, the two sexes are equal before the law. But let us not forget that this modesty is classed under illusions, salutary appearances, in a sub-chapter devoted to comedy, to roles played in society, to deceit and to mirages. Like ‘propriety’, decorum, ‘beautiful appearance’, ‘politeness’ – all related themes – modesty might well be a moral subterfuge. It would equalize the sexes by moralizing them, getting the woman to participate in universal fraternity: in a word, in humanity. The modest woman is a brother for man.
Let us not conclude from this that she becomes less desirable for all that. Precisely the contrary! Modesty would then belong to a history [une histoire], a history of fraternization, a history qua fraternization, which begins in a non-truth and should end up making non-truth true. Is this not what Kant says immediately afterwards? He has just named modesty, propriety and the beautiful appearance. Here is the moment when he recalls Aristotle:
Politeness (politesse [in French in the text]) is an appearance of affability which instils affection. Bowing and scraping (compliments) and all courtly gallantry, together with the warmest verbal assurance of friendship, are not always completely truthful. ‘My dear friends,’ says Aristotle, ‘there is no friend.’ But these demonstrations of politeness do not deceive because everyone knows how they should be taken, especially because signs of well-wishing and respect, though originally empty, gradually lead to genuine dispositions of the soul (zu wirklichen Gesinnungen dieser Art hinleiten).
It is indeed a matter of a history of truth. A matter, more precisely, of a trial of verification, qua the history of a becoming-true of illusion. A history which is made qua the story one tells to oneself and others: history is made while the story is being told; it is made in being related.
(This Kantian history of truth qua the history of an error could be converted by a good philosophical computer into Hegelian software, then into Nietzschean – it’s already happening, isn’t it?)
Such a history of verification is inseparable from the history of humanization qua fraternization. As a consequence, the crime against humanity – what Kant will call ‘high treason against humanity’ – consists in not taking into account a history, precisely, of this history that makes that which was only appearance, illusion, ‘small change’ (Scheidemünze: we have already noted this Kantian obsession: currency qua devalued currency, even counterfeit money5) become true and serious. The crime against humanity would be to disdain currency, however devalued, illusory or false it may be; it would be to take counterfeit money for counterfeit, for what it is, and to let it come into its truth as counterfeit money. The crime would be not to do everything in one’s power to change it into gold – that is, into virtue, morality, true friendship. To do this, as we shall see, one must leave childhood, and this is always the sign whereby Kant recognizes Enlightenment. It will always be asked, of course, on which side lies the greatest deception: on the side of the person who, in the name of truth, mocks the difference between real and counterfeit money; or – and this is Kant – the person who would entrust virtue with the obligation of changing small change into gold – on pain of betraying mankind, of being indicted for ‘high treason against humanity’:
Every human virtue in circulation is small change; only a child takes it for real gold. Nevertheless, it is better to circulate pocket pieces than nothing at all. In the end, they can be converted into genuine gold coin, though at a considerable loss (mit ansehnlichem Verlust). To pass them off as nothing but counters which have no value, to say with the sarcastic Swift that ‘Honesty [is] a pair of Shoes worn out in the Dirt’, and so forth, or to slander even a Socrates (as the preacher Hofstede did in his attack on Marmontel’s Bélisairé), for the sake of preventing anyone from believing in virtue, all this is high treason perpetrated upon humanity (ein an der Menschheit verüber Hochverrath). Even the appearance of the good in others must have value for us, because in the long run something serious can come from such a play with pretences (Verstellungen) which gain respect even if they do not deserve to.
The emphasis is mine. Kant says nothing of the price to be paid, of this ‘considerable loss’ that can accompany the becoming-gold of currency, the becoming-truth of the simulacrum, its verification or its authentication. Who comes off worst? What exactly would be lost?
We had recalled two dimensions in the relation to the other: respect and responsibility, stressing that which, from the vantage point of what might be called aesthetic in the Kantian sense, the former owes to the spatial figure of distance and gaze, the latter to the time of speech. These two dimensions intersect in the ethics or the virtue of friendship: responsible friendship before reason, when reason makes the Idea of equality an obligation. The absolute respect and responsibility of brothers before one another but in so far as they must be respectful and responsible before the father, this time reciprocally but not equally in either case, in a love and not in a friendship, in a reciprocal but not symmetrical love.
In principle this double dimension maintains the absolute singularity of the other and that of ‘my’ relation to the other, as a relation of the other to the other I am myself, as its other for itself. But the relation to the singularity of the other also passes through the universality of law. This discourse on universallty can determine itself in the regions of morality, of law or of politics, but it always appeals to a third instance, beyond the face-to-face of singularities. This is why we have been so attentive, in Kant’s text, to the uprising of the third friend, and to the question of secrecy that it opens up and forever keeps from closing.
The third party always witnesses a law that comes to interrupt the vertigo of singularity, this double singularity or dual in which one might see the features of a narcissism, in the most conventional sense of the term. Would we have here more than one model of friendship, more than one example as regards what Cicero called the example, the exemplar, the friend qua model and portrait – self-portrait in which I project my ideal image? If this were hypothetically the case, one of these models could find its motto in one of the Aristotelian definitions of the friend as ‘another oneself6 or in the legendary response of Montaigne (‘If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it can only be expressed by replying: “Because it was him: because it was me.”’7).
The other model (if it be other, and if it does not deploy the traps that the first sets the other) would rather inspire particular sentences of Zarathustra, who so often addresses the friend as a brother, beginning with the address on virtue (‘My brother, if you have a virtue and it is your own virtue, you have it in common with no one’8). Another model, at least as regards its form. The form of desire: to interrupt the jealous narcissism of the dual relation, which always remains imprisoned between ‘me’ and ‘me’, ‘I’ and ‘me’; to do everything possible to keep it from sliding into the abyss of specular jealousy. Is there a worse jealousy than jealousy of self? In truth, is there any other? Is one ever jealous of another? Jealous of someone besides one’s very own brother? Who is the more-than-one, the supplement of the one-in-excess’?:
‘One is always one too many around me’ – thus speaks the hermit. ‘Always once one – in the long run that makes two!’
I and Me are always too earnestly in conversation with one another: how could it be endured, if there were not a friend? For the hermit the friend is always the third person: the third person is the cork that prevents the conversation of the other two from sinking to the depths.9
We were saying that this was another model of friendship. But is there more than one model here? And is it a matter of alternatives? Are there really two different, even antagonistic or incompatible, structures? Perhaps they imply one another – a supplementary ruse – at the very moment when they seem to exclude one other. Does not my relation to the singularity of the other qua other, in effect, involve the law? Having come as a third party but always from the singularity of the other, does not the law command me to recognize the transcendent alterity of the other who can never be anything but heterogeneous and singular, hence resistant to the very generality of the law?
Far from dissolving the antagonism and forcing the aporia, this co-implication, it is true, only aggravates them – at the very heart of friendship.
The singularity/universality divide has always divided the experience, the concept and the interpretation of friendship. It has determined other oppositions within friendship. Schematically: on the one hand, the secret-private-invisible-illegible-apolitical, ultimately without concept; on the other, the manifest-public-testamonial-political, homogeneous to the concept.
Between the two terms of the opposition, the schema or the familial symbol (we will henceforth understand the terms ‘symbol’ and ‘schema’ in the Kantian sense: between the sensible singularity of intuition and the generality of the concept or Idea). On the one hand, fraternal friendship appears essentially alien or rebel to the res publica; it could never found a politics. But on the other, as we have proved, from Plato to Montaigne, Aristotle to Kant, Cicero to Hegel, the great philosophical and canonical discourses on friendship will have explicitly tied the friend-brother to virtue and justice, to moral reason and political reason.
The principal question would rightly concern the hegemony of a philosophical canon in this domain: how has it prevailed? Whence derives its force? How has it been able to exclude the feminine or heterosexuality, friendship between women or friendship between men and women? Why can an essential inventory not be made of feminine or heterosexual experiences of friendship? Why this heterogeneity between érōs and philía? Why cannot such a history of the canon be reduced to a history of philosophical concepts or texts, nor even to a history of ‘political’ structures as such – that is, structures determined by a concept of the political, by this concept of the political? Why is it a matter of a history of the world itself, one which would be neither a continuous evolution nor a simple succession of discontinuous figures? From this vantage point, the question of friendship might well be at least an example or a lead in the two major questions of ‘deconstruction’: the question of the history of concepts and (trivially) so-called ‘textual’ hegemony, history tout court, and the question of phallogocentrism.10 Here qua phratrocentrism.
These philosophical canons will have posed the moral and political conditions of an authentic friendship – and vice versa. These discourses also differ among themselves – no one would claim the contrary – and, well beyond what we have just delineated, they call for long and careful analyses. Such analyses should in particular not decide too quickly, in the name of the law, to identify morality and politics: it is sometimes in the name of morality that one has removed friendship from the separations and criteria of politics.
Hence the endless raising of the stakes whose law we have attempted to formalize. This law confounds Aristotle, for example, when he attempts to place friendship above the law and politics. (‘When men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality.’11) But if friendship is above justice – juridical, political, or moral – it is therefore also immediately the most just. Justice beyond justice. Fraternity qua ‘law beyond law’ (Michelet). In all forms of government or consititution (royalty, aristocracy, timocracy, republic or politeía – and democracy as the least evil of constitutions: ‘for in its case the form of constitution is but a slight deviation’12), one sees a form of friendship coterminous with relations of justice appear. And if, in tyranny, friendship and justice play only an insignificant role, the opposite is the case in democracy where, as we have seen, the brother relation prevails.13 It should also be recalled that justice has two dimensions, one non-written, the other codified by law; therefore, likewise, friendship grounded in usefulness – the case in political friendship – may be moral or legal.14 The oppositions we are thus recalling seem to dominate the interpretation and experience of friendship in our culture. An unstable domination undermined from within, but all the more imperious for that.
What relation does this domination maintain with the double exclusion we see at work in all the great ethico-politico-philosophical discourses on friendship: on the one hand, the exclusion of friendship between women; on the other, the exclusion of friendship between a man and a woman? This double exclusion of the feminine in this philosophical paradigm would then confer on friendship the essential and essentially sublime figure of virile homosexuality. If, in the schema or the familial symbol, this exclusion privileges the figure of the brother, the name of the brother or the name of ‘brother’15, rather than the name (of the) father, it would be all the more necessary to relate this political model, especially that of democracy, to the tradition of the Decalogue, notably in its Christianization (which would not be terribly original, let us admit), as well as to the rereading of the Freudian hypothesis on the alliance between brothers – after but already before the parricide, in view of a murder all the more useless, all the more interfered with in its act by the simulacrum or the phantasm (which does not limit the effectiveness of its effects) since it bestows even more power on the dead father, and must indeed presuppose moral (egalitarian and universalist) law to explain the shame and remorse which, according to Freud, would have ensued in the wake of the crime, and then – and only then, have grounded egalitarian law qua the interdict of killing.
(Having stressed the problems and paradoxes of the Freudian hypothesis elsewhere,16 I prefer not to return here, despite its importance, to the reference in Totem and Taboo or The Man Moses.… To sound the keynote of a development to come, and notably concerning the Christianization of the fraternal community, let us be content here with situating a comic, vertiginous, and highly significant episode in the history of psychoanalysis itself. In question is the politico-strategic strategy of the relations between Freud and his momentary Christian ally, Jung. One letter from Ferenczi says more, by itself, than any glosses, which we will not bother with here. We shall quote several passsages, following the selective principle of several themes: the psychoanalytic challenge to a ‘mutualist’ logic of all democratic communities, hence to philía par excellence; the dissymmetry of the analysand/analyst relation; the heterogeneity between transference (qua ‘love’, as Freud said) and all possible friendship; the irreversible transcendence of the archontic or founding agency with regard to the founded institution; the irreversible transcendence of the paternal position with regard to a fraternal community, singularly in its Christian form; the structural resistance of Christianity to psychoanalysis; the theory of the sovereign exception qua the power of the father (of psychoanalysis) of self-analysis for a unique and therefore ‘first time in the history of humanity’, etc. – the whole lot assumed with the utmost seriousness by one of the first disciples, without the slightest irony, in an address to the father that we shall also take seriously, despite the outburst of laughter – terminable interminable – which will rock us to the end. To the end – that is, as long as we will be saying, in reading such a letter (for example), that really, if something has not happened to psychoanalysis up until now, this is indeed typical of psychoanalysis; and that undoubtedly nothing will never happen to it, especially not in the chain of generations of its founding fathers, unless psychoanalysis itself would already have happened in this non-event, the event of this non-event, and this would be what, perhaps, we must strive to think, to live, and finally to admit. Here, then, are a few excerpts, but the whole volume should be read from the first page to the last:
Dear Professor, I thank you for your detailed letter. Jung’s behavior is uncommonly impudent. He forgets that it was he who demanded students from the ‘analytic community’ and that they be treated like patients. But as soon as it has to do with him, he doesn’t want this rule to be valid anymore. Mutual analysis is nonsense, also an impossibility. Everyone must be able to tolerate an authority over himself from whom he accepts analytic correction. You are probably the only one who can permit himself to do without an analyst; but that is actually no advantage to you, i.e., for your analysis, but a necessity: you have no peer or even superior analyst at your disposal because you have been doing analysis fifteen years longer than all others and have accumulated experiences which we others still lack. – Despite all the deficiencies of self-analysis (which is certainly lengthier and more difficult than being analyzed), we have to expect of you the ability to keep your symptoms in check. If you had the strength to overcome in yourself, without a leader (for the first time in the history of humanity) [Ferenczi’s emphasis], the resistances which all humanity brings to bear on the results of analysis, then we must expect of you the strength to dispense with your lesser symptoms.…
… I, too, went through a period of rebellion against your ‘treatment’.
… Jung is the typical instigator and founder of religion. The father plays almost no role in his new work; the Christian community of brothers [Ferenczi’s emphasis] takes up all the more room in it. – His book [Metamorphoses and Symbols of the Libido, published in the Jahrbuch in 1911–12] has a frightfully repellent effect on me; I loathe its content and its form; its superfluous slyness, superficiality, and cloyingly poeticizing tone make me hate it. Imagine – I still haven’t finished reading it.
Much further on in the same letter, Ferenczi tells two of his dreams, with accompanying drawings. Two more excerpts:
I.… [(Indistinct) A woman stands on a table and protects herself from the snake by tightly pressing on her dress.] You and your sister-in-law play a role in this dream …
II.… My younger brother, Karl, has just cut off his penis to perform coitus (!). I think something like: that is not necessary, a condom would have been sufficient! …17
The double exclusion of the feminine would not be unrelated to the movement that has always ‘politicized’ the friendship model at the very moment when one strives to rescue it from thoroughgoing politicization. The tension is here on the inside of the political itself. It is at work in all the discourses that reserve politics and public space to man, domestic and private space to woman. This is also, for Hegel, the opposition of day and night – and therefore a great number of other oppositions.18
What is Nietzsche’s place in this ‘history’? And why do we thus unceasingly return to him? Does he confirm in depth this old tradition which refuses woman the sense of friendship, for the moment (‘not yet’, as Michelet also said)?
Many indications seem in fact to confirm this. Beginning with Zarathustra’s sentences in ‘Of the Friend’. Three times over it is said that ‘woman is not yet capable of friendship’ (‘Deshalb ist das Weib noch nicht der Freundschaft fähig: … Noch ist das Weib nicht der Freundschat fähig:’ … ‘Nach ist das Weib nicht der Freundschaft fähig’).
These three times must be respected. They concatenate immediately, but what a leap from one to the next! The song ‘Of the Friend’ began with the speech of the Hermit, as one recalls (always more than one, always one too many, always one time one, that makes two, and three will be necessary to counter the specular jealousy between I and me, etc.). But the hermit is too attracted to the depths or the abyss, he is nostalgic for elevation; he is dreaming of a friend to gain altitude. This is all a matter of belief. What does the friend’s nostalgia reveal? That we wish to believe in the other because we want, in vain, to believe in ourselves. This nostalgia has some affinity with the one Heidegger believes he is able to pick up at the origin of philosophical philía. It therefore fires the envy towards the other as well as towards self. We envy each other. Love would be but the attempt to leap beyond this envy. And the aggression whereby we make an enemy, whereby we make ourselves our own enemy, is only a reaction. It hides and reveals, at one and the same time, our vulnerability. The true fear, the true respect, then pronounces: ‘At least be my enemy! (Sei wenigstens mein Feind!)’. Zarathustra takes on the tone of a Blake (‘Do be my enemy for Friendships sake!’) to address an enemy, to speak to him in the name of friendship. There is more friendship, and more nostalgia, in speaking to one’s enemy – more precisely, in begging the other to become one’s enemy – than in speaking of the friend without addressing him. There would thus be more declared friendship, more avowed community, in the canonical version of the Aristotelian sentence ‘O my friends…’, than in the reportive version of the recoil, which states and registers the bottom line on the friend and on friends. Even more friendly, more declared and avowed in its friendship, would be the inverted apostrophe ‘O enemies!…’. If there is more respect or fear here, it is because this demand for enmity comes from someone who dare not entreat the other to give him friendship: ‘At least be my enemy!’ he then says. Conclusion: if you want a friend, you must wage war on him, and in order to wage war, you must be capable of it, capable of having a ‘best enemy’.
A eulogy of friendship will now follow, drawing the ineluctable consequence of this axiom. To be capable of this friendship, to be able to honour in the friend the enemy he can become, is a sign of freedom. Freedom itself. Now this is a freedom that neither tyrants nor slaves know. Therefore, it is a political translation of the axiom. The slave and the tyrant have neither friend nor enemy. They are not free and ‘equal’ enough for that. With this political conclusion, Zarathustra brings up the case of woman. She is at once tyrant and slave, and that is why she (still) remains incapable of friendship, she knows only love. This thesis concerns not only woman, but the hierarchy between love and friendship. Love is below friendship because it is an above/below relation, one of inferiority and superiority, slavery and tyranny. It is implied, then, that friendship is freedom plus equality. The only thing missing is fraternity, and we are coming to that. Thus is the first of the three sentences engendered: ‘In woman, a slave and a tyrant have all too long been concealed. For that reason, woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love.’ Feminine love causes only ‘injustice’ and ‘blindness’ to be seen in all that is not loved. In other words, woman remains incapable of respecting the enemy, of honouring what she does not love. Incapable of such a respect, incapable of the freedom entailed by that respect, she could never have either friends or enemies as such. Only a free and respectful consciousness could ever attain to this as such, this phenomenal essence of the friend or enemy, as well as of the couple they form.
Such a judgement on the subject of woman has political value. It is a political judgement confirmed by the second sentence, the one immediately following, inscribing this political condemnation in its most traditional system. Incapable of friendship, enmity, justice, war, respect for the other, whether friend or enemy, woman is not man; she is not even part of humanity. Still addressing his friend as a brother, especially in speaking in truth to him of ends and virtues (‘Wahrlich, mein Bruder…’, he regularly says), Zarathustra declares here that woman is the oudaw of humanity – in any case as regards the question of loving, if not that of childbirth and suckling; the nurturing mother is perhaps human (like a ‘cow’) but not the lover that woman can be – woman, to whom friendship still remains inaccessible: ‘Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds. Or, at best, cows.’
Now here we see a sort of apostrophical reversal: the third sentence. Confirming what has just been pronounced on women, Zarathustra suddenly turns towards men – he apostrophizes them, accusing them, in sum, of being in the same predicament. Woman was not man, a man free and capable of friendship, and not only of love. Well now, neither is man a man. Not yet. And why not? Because he is not yet generous enough, because he does not know how to give enough to the other. To attain to this infinite gift, failing which there is no friendship, one must know how to give to the enemy. And of this, neither woman nor man (up until now) is capable. Under the category of ‘not yet’ (noch … nicht), hence this ‘up until now’ that we were questioning above, man and woman are equal in this respect. Up until now, they are equally late, although woman is lagging behind man. They are equal in avarice (Geiz), equally unable to give and love in friendship. Neither one (not yet, up until now) is one of these true brothers, these friends or enemies, these friends qua possible enemies, those whom Zarathustra nevertheless already, starting now, addresses and appeals to (teleiopoetically). This is the third sentence: ‘Woman is not yet capable of friendship. But tell me, you men, which of you is yet capable of friendship?/Oh your poverty, you men, and your avarice of soul! (und euren Geiz der Seele!) As much as you give to your friend I will give even to my enemy, and will not have grown poorer in doing so.’
One must be patient in the face of this ‘not yet’, and meditate in all due time the ‘up until now’ positioned on the threshold of this dissymmetrical gift. For it extends also to man (Mann), but first and foremost, again, to Zarathustra’s brother. He bears the future of a question, of a call or a promise, a complaint or a prayer. In the performative mode of the apostrophe. There is no friendship as yet, it has not yet begun to be thought. But, in a sort of mourned anticipation, we can already name the friendship that we have not yet met. A threshold naming: we are saying here, on the threshold, that we already think that we do not yet have access to friendship. May we have it one day! Such is the exclamation mark, the singular clamour, of this wish. This is Zarathustra’s ‘O my friends, there is neither friend nor enemy’.
The end of the song rings out in a still more singular way. For is not what has just been repeated, doubled, parodied, perverted and assumed also the Gospel message? Is it not, more precisely, that which commands us to love our enemies as universal brothers, beyond our own family and even our own biological (foster, uterine, or consanguine) brothers? Yes and no – we shall have to return to this. Here now, after the raising of the stakes on the Christian heritage, is the reimplementation of the Aristotelian heritage, around the opposition we have already encountered between the friend and the companion. Fundamentally, that of which man will have been capable up until now – at least up until now – is certainly not perfect friendship (teleía or prótē philía), only comradeship. Now comradeship must be surpassed. But given that it can be surpassed only in giving infinitely to the enemy, which Aristotle never said, the Gospels must be played against Aristotelian virtue and against Greek friendship par excellence. This is enough to discourage anyone wishing to establish a reassuring historical scansion – that is, a decidable and clear-cut one – to make this strategy coherent. It would be better to give up the idea immediately and think up different ways of doing history or the historian’s profession. For that which thus defies the tranquillity of the historian is a strategy of friendship, a war for friendship. Friendship is now the stake of these endless strategies. And must not one think, or at least approach, this other history, hence this other friendship, to leave comradeship? Comrades, try again! Zarathustra is speaking of friendship also to historians and theologians – and this is the end of his song: ‘There is comradeship: may there be friendship! (Es gibt Kameradschaft: möge es Freundschaft geben!).’ Since this ‘es gibt’ and this ‘geben’ immediately follow a definition of friendship by the gift, for the friend as well as for the enemy (‘Wie viel ihr dem Freunde gebt, das will ich noch meinem Feinde geben’), it can be supposed that the ‘there is’ (‘es gibt’) or the ‘may there be’ (‘möge es geben’) give themselves only to the extent of the gift. The gift is that which gives friendship; it is needed for there to be friendship, beyond all comradeship.
But as woman has not yet attained to friendship because she remains – and this is love – ‘slave’ or ‘tyrant’, friendship to come continues to mean, for Zarathustra: freedom, equality, fraternity. The fragile, unstable and recent motto, as we have seen, of a republic. Unless it appeals to a friendship capable of simultaneously overwhelming philosophical history (Aristotelian, as we have just seen) and Enlightenment fraternity qua the sublation [relève] (we have seen enough signs of this) of Christian fraternity: three friendships in one, the same, in sum, with which one must break.
Another song leads us on to this path, one that begins shortly after ‘Of the Friend’. ‘Of Love of One’s Neighbour’ (Von der Nächstenliebe) seems to oppose friend to neighbour, and blatantly to the neighbour of the Gospels. In truth, it does not oppose friend to neighbour, it wishes to raise it above the neighbour – and this in the name of the far-off and of the future. The neighbour is believed, like his name, to be close and present. Friendship is a thing of distance, a thing of the future; hence ‘Do I exhort you to love of your neighbour? I exhort you rather to flight from your neighbour and to love of the most distant (Femsten-Liebe)’. Zarathustra thus addresses brothers not yet bom, his brothers to come but supposed already to be prepared to hear him where they are as yet still incapable of doing so. And this is why they must be spoken to. Ready to hear, they will be ready when they have heard. This teleiopoetic word accomplishes the Gospel word in perverting it, it sets it awry and de-natures it, but in order to keep its promise. If this Gospel word promises spiritual fraternity, beyond milk and blood (but owing to other blood, to another eucharistic body – this is the whole question, and Zarathustra does not fail to take it up); if the word of Christ thus promises the true filiation of brothers of the ‘father who is in heaven’, is this not in terms of a love of neighbour which prescribes, as does Zarathustra, the love of one’s enemies? One becomes a brother, in Christianity, one is worthy of the eternal father, only by loving one’s enemy as one’s neighbour or as oneself. Here we have the profit of a sublime economy, an economy beyond economy, a salary that is transformed into the gold of non-salary. Let us cite here only Matthew, aware nevertheless that we are on the brink of a work of infinite reading:
You have heard the commandment, ‘You shall love your countryman but hate your enemy.’ My command to you is: love your enemies, pray for your persecutors. This will prove that you are sons of your heavenly Father, for his sun rises on the bad and the good, he rains on the just and the unjust. If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that? Do ‘not tax collectors do as much? And if you greet your brothers only, what is so praiseworthy about that? Do not pagans do as much? In a word, you must be made perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.19
Does not Zarathustra also entreat the friend to come around to an absolute gift that breaks with the ruse of this sublime economy? Is not the friendship for his brother qua neighbour and son of God still in search of the pure gold of an infinite wage? Does it not still seek – to pick up once again the Kantian motif that we evoked above – the best exchange rate for virtue? In any case, it is in the name of the friend who ‘bestows’ that Zarathustra advises against the love of one’s neighbour, but a wageless, unrequited bestowal.
The gift he then names must also belong to the finite world. One would thus have to think the dissymmetry of a gift without exchange, therefore an infinite one – infinitely disproportionate, in any case, however modest it may be, from the vantage point of terrestial finitude. From under its horizon without horizon. For we have just suspected infinitization itself of being an economic ruse. A certain ‘gild’ is denounced in the same song, and it would be like a Christian seduction, the love of one’s neighbour as the manoeuvring hypocrisy of a perverse seduction, a stratagem to mislead the other towards oneself:
You cannot endure to be alone with yourselves and do not love yourselves enough: now you want to mislead your neighbour into love and gild yourselves with his mistake (und euch mit seinem Irrtum vergolden).
Such a finitism would then revert from Christian to Greek, if we could still rely on this distinction, which we are doing less and less often:
I do not teach you the neighbour but the friend. May the friend be to you a festival of the earth and a foretaste of the Superman.
I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But you must understand how to be a sponge if you want to be loved by overflowing hearts.
I teach you the friend in whom the world stands complete, a vessel of the good – the creative friend, who always has a completed world to bestow.
And as the world once dispersed for him, so it comes back to him again, as the evolution of good through evil, as the evolution of design from chance.
May the future and the most distant be the principle of your today: in your friend you should love the Superman as your principle.
My brothers, I do not exhort you to love of your neighbour: I exhort you to love of the most distant.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.20
Three remarks before interrupting – as we must – these songs. They concern the gift, the superman, and the spectre.
1. The gift. This friend of the most distant belongs to the finite earth, to be sure, not to the world of Christian hinterworlds. But far from limiting the gift that he perhaps then gives, his finitude infinitizes it. Zarathustra’s friend, this friend to come, this friend of the far removed, does not give this or that, in just any economy (in which the virtuous would still want to be paid21), he gives a world, he gives all, he gives that in which all gifts may appear; and like all gifts, this gift of the world must nevertheless be determined: it is this world, a completed world. A friend who does not give you the world, and a world which, because it exists, has form and limit, being this world and not another, gives you nothing. To think this friendship, which would be neither Greek nor Christian, this gift would have to be thought as the gift of the world, and above all (but above all) as gift of a finite world.
2. The Superman. To be sure, he is awaited, announced, called, to come, but – contradictory as it may seem – it is because he is the origin and the cause of man. He is the originary (Ursache) cause of man. Man is called – and called into question – by his cause. His cause is naturally beyond him. With regard to this friend promised, announced, hoped for (always following the same thrust of the messianico-teleiopoetic perhaps) the friendship against which these men and women were judged up until now, and judged incapable, owing to a lack of humanity, precisely, and of liberty – well, this very friendship, this friendship to come, would still be too human. At the very least it deserves its name ‘friendship’, and properly human friendship, only providing it lets itself be transfixed by the expectation of the superman to come. But to come as cause or origin, – that is, as immemorially past. This is the only possible experience of a ‘most distant’ that remains approachable only in being unapproachable. Fundamentally, all the concepts of a friendship of presence and proximity whose anthropological, anthropocentric or humanist character we have been emphasizing hitherto would be situated and delimited here. Even if this anthropocentrism were also, sometimes, anthropo-theological or onto-theological, the profound structure of the concept would not be modified. Its centre of gravity would remain as close as possible to proximity, in the present of the closest.
3. The spectre. In a passage that we were reading above,22 and precisely in Human All Too Human, Nietzsche, as it were, had resurrected ‘phantom friends’, those who have not changed while we have been transformed. These friends returned as the phantom of our past – in sum, our memory, the silhouette of the ghost who not only appears to us (phantasmata, phenomena, phantoms, things of sight, things of respect, the respect which returns and comes down to the spectre), but an invisible past, hence a past that can speak, and speak to us in an icy voice, ‘as if we were hearing ourselves’. Here, this should be exactly the opposite, since it is a question of the friend, of the superman whose present friendship urges the arrival. Not the past friend, but the friend to come. Now what is coming is still spectral, and it must be loved as such. As if there were never anything but spectres, on both sides of all opposition, on both sides of the present, in the past and in the future. All phenomena of friendship, all things and all beings to be loved, belong to spectrality. ‘It is necessary to love’ means: the spectres, they are to be loved; the spectre must be respected (we know that Mary Shelley brought our attention to the anagram that makes the spectre in respect become visible again). And here we have the sentence addressed by Zarathustra to his brother. Here is what the song ‘Of Love of One’s Neighbour’ promises him: the friend to come, the arrivant who comes from afar, the one who must be loved in remoteness and from afar, the superman – and it is a spectre:
Higher than love of one’s neighbour stands love of the most distant man and of the man of the future; higher still than love of man I account love of causes and of phantoms (die Liebe zu Sachen und Gespenstern).
This phantom that runs along behind you, my brother, is fairer than you; why do you not give it your flesh and bones? But you are afraid and you run to your neighbour, (p. 87)
A spectral distance would thus assign its condition to memory as well as to the future as such. The as such itself is affected with spectrality; hence is it no longer or not yet exactly what it is. The disjunction of spectral distance would, by this very fact, mark both the past and the future with a non-reappropriable alterity.23
Thus, at least, spoke Zarathustra. We have refrained from substituting Nietzsche’s name for his, as if, from one ghost to another, it never came down to the same one. Things are already unattackable and inappropriable enough as they are for each ghost. Neither should one rush to consider a single one of Zarathustra’s sentences as Gospel. Having commanded them to be capable of facing the enemy, of respecting, fearing, honouring him; having recalled that a humanity in default of an end also defaults itself – is itself lacking in humanity – Zarathustra demands of his disciples that they leave him: repudiate me, be ashamed of the one who ‘perhaps has deceived you’. ‘For the man of knowledge must not only love his friends: he must also be able to hate his enemies!’ This is the immense song ‘Of the Bestowing Virtue’, in whose end, in a neo-evangelical scene, Zarathustra addresses his brothers to promise his return. Then, after the separation, after the repudiation, another love – friendship itself – will be possible. Zarathustra swears, invites, bids, demands the oath:
Now I bid you (Nun heisse ich euch) lose me and find yourselves, and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.
Truly, with other eyes, my brothers, I shall then seek my lost ones; with another love I shall then love you.
And once more you shall have become my friends and children of one hope: and then I will be with you a third time, that I may celebrate the great noontide with you.…
‘All gods are dead: now we want the Superman to live’ – let this be our last will, one day, at the great noontide!
This is only the end of Part One. To relaunch it, it will become the epigraph of Part Two. The entire path of this abyssal altercation with Christian fraternity had begun, as we will recall, with the evocation of the hermit. As Zarathustra is also addressing another brother to come, but one who is already listening to him, there would be – among all the tasks that thus assign themselves to us but which, alas, we have to give up pursuing – an ancient and new history to relate and to make, from this point of view, of Christian fraternity: not only its theme, its concept and its figures but its orders, fraternities as institutions (an analogous and equally urgent investigation would deal with the figure of the brother in Arabo-Islamic culture – and with the ‘Muslim brothers’). Faced with this task, our shortcoming has no avowable justification here. Let it nevertheless be clear that we believe in the gravity of the obligation which the limits of this work oblige us to shirk. We have insisted sufficiently on the indefinite recoils of the discourse and strategy of Zarathustra in order not to be convinced in advance that the history of the brother in the Bible and in the Koran, as is the case in the history of orders called ‘fraternities’, contains in itself, here or there, in one fold or recoil or another, reason enough for finding ourselves beside Zarathustra or his disciples rather than in a posture of confrontation.
Let us hold at least to this evidence: these songs of Zarathustra are also songs of mourning. He is taking leave, he asks to be repudiated, he will return, and the returning ghost who promises his brothers that they will then be his brothers or friends is indeed a testament, a ‘this is my body’ offered again to them.
As if there were no interminable mourning other than the mourning of the brother, and as if the friendship we have been speaking about would dry up after this impossible mourning: only by deferring it can this friendship begin to mourn. There is no possible introjection or incorporation; this is the canon of friendship. Successful, a death without remainder, or an ideal death, the mourning of the brother would run too great a risk of allowing the father to return. This is what, at any price, the brothers’ conjuration desires – anything but the return of the father! – what we have hitherto been calling friendship, the one conjured away by Zarathustra as well as the one in the name of which he bids his brothers to come – one friendship against the other, but one along with the other. As if friendship were playing against the love of the father. And as if the scene could be framed thus: without a woman.
Let us backtrack for a moment. If the great canonical meditations on friendship (Cicero’s De Amicitia, Montaigne’s ‘On Friendship’, Blanchot’s L’amitié, for example) belong to the experience of mourning, to the moment of loss – that of the friend or of friendship – if through the irreplaceable element of the named they always advance in testimonial order to confide and refuse the death of the unique to a universalizable discourse (‘… my friends, there is no friend’: Aristotle-Montaigne; ‘But what has become of my friends?’: Villon; ‘Wo aber sind die Freunde?’: Hölderlin), if by this token they simultaneously found and destabilize, if they restore, because they threaten them, a great number of oppositions (singular/universal, private/public, familial/political, secret/phenomenal, etc.), and perhaps all oppositions, can it be said that the relative invariance of this model is itself fractured and fractures itself [se fracture elle-même], and opens on to its own abyss? Going back over all the motifs that we have just touched upon (the ethics and politics of friendship, death, the name, fraternity, etc.), reconsidering all these oppositions, could we not discern two major ruptures in what, for sheer convenience, would be called the history of friendship, whereas a certain friendship might very well (we have seen so many indications of this) shake up the most traditional concept of historicity? And how are they to be related to the double exclusion of the feminine, the exclusion of friendship between a man and a woman and the exclusion of friendship between women? The categories of ‘not yet’ and of ‘up until now’ make this assurance tenuous. It might well urge us to stop speaking simply of exclusion. We have attempted to show that the Graeco-Roman model, which seems to be governed by the value of reciprocity, by homological, immanentist, finitist – and rather politist – concord, bears within itself, nevertheless, potentially, the power to become infinite and dissymmetrical. Montaigne (whom we are reading here as an example of a canonical paradigm) undoubtedly inherits most of these features. But when he breaks with the reciprocity and discreedy introduces – it seems to me – heterology, transcendence, dissymmetry and infinity, hence a Christian type of logic (‘… he infinitely surpassed me’; ‘I would have entrusted myself to him with greater assurance than to myself; ‘… For the very writings which Antiquity have left us on this subject seem weak to me compared to what I feel’), he also accomplishes the so-called Greek model of friendship. That which ensures the mediation or the solder – in any case, a certain continuity between the two times – that which also relates to the exclusion of woman, if only in the form or the pretext of ‘not yet’, is the brother, and, more precisely, the name, the name ‘brother’ and the brother’s name. We have quoted, without bringing them into comparison, two of Montaigne’s declarations. One praised the name ‘brother’, the other the brother’s name. Let us recall them. One spoke the name ‘brother’ in its genericity: ‘The name of brother is truly a fair one and full of love: that is why La Boétie and I made a brotherhood of our alliance.’24 The other spoke the brother’s name, in its singularity. Montaigne, speaking precisely of the testamentary piece that forms the starting point of ‘On Friendship’, enunciates in two steps the incredible time of the name. The name ensures the ‘fraternal solder’ in that it precedes, as it were, the encounter with the friend and bestows on friendship a ‘force’ and an ‘effort’ which imparts existence to it prior to its existence, as it will also allow it, by the same dismembering of the surviving stance [survivance], to exist after it has existed. Owing to the name, friendship begins prior to friendship; owing to the name, friendship survives friendship; friendship always begins by surviving. One might just as well say friendship is never there; it’s as simple as that. Nor the friend of which, from this point of view, there are none. As we were saying, Montaigne enunciates this in two steps.
1. First as the heir or legatee of the friend, ‘with death on his hps’:
This is all I have been able to recover of his literary remains, I the heir to whom, with death on his lips, he so lovingly willed his books and his papers – apart from the slim volume of his works which I have had published already.
Yet I am particularly indebted to that treatise, because it first brought us together: it was shown to me long before I met him and first made me acquainted with his name; 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.25
2. Next, when he does have to admit (but who, in the urge to quote a saying which seems to carry an ineffable singularity beyond the name, will have noticed it?) that the ‘Because it was him; because it was me’ goes ‘beyond all my reasoning’ only by virtue of the name, owing to the name. The name is the cause of everything in this friendship. The time of the name is what bestows this force of approach, this power of proximity or of ‘union’ which defies discourse: the name against the discourse, before and after it; the name qua force, affection, mediation, these nameless concepts (without common names) which speak the effect of the proper name. As in the passage quoted just a moment ago, God is named in the place where this name is so mysteriously active. Only the name of God and ‘some decree of Heaven’ can account for this reason of the name, for these effects of the name. Of the proper name, of course, and of a famous name, which comes more easily to men than to women, to brothers than to sisters, to sons than to daughters:
… the seam which joins them together.… If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it can only be expressed by replying: ‘Because it was him; because it was me.’ Mediating this union there was, beyond all my reasoning, beyond all that I can say specifically about it, some inexplicable force of destiny. We were seeking each other before we set eyes on each other – both because of the reports we each had heard, which made a more violent assault on our emotions than was reasonable from what they had said, and, I believe, because of some decree of Heaven: we embraced each other by repute, and at our first meeting, which chanced to be at a great crowded town-festival, we discovered ourselves to be so seized by each other, so known to each other and so bound together that from then on none was so close as each was to the other, (p. 212)
Concerning what is of import to us here, the two features of the name must undoubtedly be held together. On the one hand, the name constitutes the very structure of the testamentary survival stance, hence of a certain speciality: the name survives a priori, if this can be said, its bearer and the person to be called, before and afterwards, beyond presence. But this general and structural feature is also enframed [arraisonné], in a certain history, as the chance of filiation, of the inherited name, as well as of renown (and Montaigne speaks as often of the proper name as of the renown which brings this legendary name to the cognizance of the friend to come, thereby giving birth to friendship). Under the two forms of this enframing (inheritance of the name and social renown) this history leaves less chance to the woman, to the daughter, to the sister. We are not saying no chance, but less chance. When one speaks of hegemony – that is, the relation of forces – the laws of structure are tendential; they are determined not (do not determine) in terms of yes or no, hence in terms of simple exclusion, but in those of differential force, more or less. It is fitting here to emphasize the impossibility of a sheer exclusion in order to account for effects of repression, hence for returns of that which should not return: symptoms and disavowals that this very law can produce and reproduce, never failing in fact to do so.
Hence one can no longer speak here of a simple fracture and say that it is Judaeo-Christian. Nor that it depoliticizes the Greek model nor that it shifts the nature of the political.
Is another event then produced when, with Nietzsche or Blanchot, we come to call the friend by a name which is no longer that of the near one or the neighbour, and undoubtedly no longer the name of man? The words rupture or interruption – as we have just confirmed – are not sufficient for the determination of what occurs with Nietzsche, especially given the authority with which the brother still dominates all the reversals. Consequently, as we suggested at the beginning, we cannot and should not elude this other question: of all that which, in our time, responds to the event of which Nietzsche was at one and the same time the signatory and the witness, the cause and the effect, might we say, following certain signs that would lead us to believe it, that in some places of thought, for some – few in number, it is true – an unprecedented rupture will have taken place? Or rather, an unprecedented thought of rupture or of interruption as the place of friendship? We are obviously thinking – as we also indicated at the beginning – of Blanchot, Bataille and everything radiating around their work without their wanting, for all that, to become its centre or source, which in fact they are not. We would wish neither, on the one hand, to efface the singularity of their name, of their names, of their thought(s), their work(s), above all their friendship (another person would say: of the friendship of this legendary pair of friends of this century to which, Kant would add, a third reliable friend came to join them, already in fact being there from the very beginning – Lévinas – and the fact that these three knew each other to different extents is of little importance) nor, on the other hand, would we want to capitalize around them all the original thoughts linked to them or to which they themselves have referred, expressly or not.
The remaining question – about which it can be asked what is left once these questions have finished ringing out – is one whose novelty we will keep in the very form which Plato gave it in Lysis, at the moment of his leavetaking following his failure: not ‘what is friendship?’ but who is the friend? Who is it? Who is he? Who is she? Who, from the moment when, as we shall see, all the categories and all the axioms which have constituted the concept of friendship in its history have let themselves be threatened with ruin: the subject, the person, the ego, presence, the family and familiarity, affinity, suitability (oikeiótēs) or proximity, hence a certain truth and a certain memory, the parent, the citizen and politics (polítēs and politeía), man himself – and, of course, the brother who capitalizes everything?
The stake of this question is, of course, also political. The political belongs to this series, even if it is sometimes placed in the position of the series’ transcendental. Is it possible, without setting off loud protests on the part of militants of an edifying or dogmatic humanism, to think and to live the gentle rigour of friendship, the law of friendship qua the experience of a certain ahumanity, in absolute separation, beyond or below the commerce of gods and men? And what politics could still be founded on this friendship which exceeds the measure of man, without becoming a theologem? Would it still be a politics?
What happens politically when the ‘Who’ of friendship then distances itself from all these determinations? In its ‘infinite imminence’ – let us listen to Blanchot – the ‘who’ exceeds even the interest in knowledge, all forms of knowledge, truth, proximity, and even as far as life itself, and the memory of life. It is not yet an identifiable, public or private ‘I’. Above all, as we are going to hear, it is some ‘one’ to whom one speaks (if only to tell him or her that there is no friend), but of whom one does not speak. This, no doubt, is why Blanchot must prefer the vocative and canonical version to the recoil version:
We have to renounce knowing those to whom we are bound by something essential; I want to say, we should welcome them in the relation to the unknown in which they welcome us, us too, in our remoteness. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, into which, however, the utter simplicity of life enters, implies the recognition of a common strangeness which does not allow us to speak of our friends, but only to speak to them, not to make of them a theme of conversations (or articles), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even in the greatest familiarity, an infinite distance, this fundamental separation from out of which that which separates becomes relation. Here, discretion is not in the simple refusal to report confidences (how gross that would be, even to think of), but it is the interval, the pure interval which, from me to this other who is a friend, measures everything there is between us, the interruption of being which never authorizes me to have him at my disposition, nor my knowledge of him (if only to praise him) and which, far from curtailing all communication, relates us one to the other in the difference and sometimes in the silence of speech.26
Consequently, if the testament or the epitaph remains the place of a De Amicitia for our time, all the signs of orison find themselves – if not negated or inversed, then at least suspended in a non-negative neutrality. Such a neutrality calls into question not only our memory of the friend, our thought of fidelity, but our memory of what ‘friendship’ has always meant. And yet we do sense that this discreet violence accomplishes an injunction which was already working away at the legacy of this tradition, and was being demanded from within our very memory. On the death of the friend, the ‘measurelessness of the movement of dying’, the ‘event’ of death reveals and effaces at the same time this ‘truth’ of friendship, if only the truth of the far-off places of which Zarathustra spoke. Oblivion is necessary:
… not the deepening of the separation, but its effacement, not an enlarging of the caesura, but its levelling, and the dissipation of this void between us where once developed the frankness of a relation without history. In such a way that at the present time that which was close to us has not only ceased its approach, but has lost even the truth of extreme remoteness. We are able, in a word, to remember. But thought knows that one does not remember: without memory, without thought, it already struggles in the invisible where all falls back into oblivion. This is the place of profound pain. It must accompany friendship into oblivion, (p. 329)
Oblivion must [Faut l’oubli]. Friendship without memory itself, by fidelity, by the gentleness and rigour of fidelity, bondless friendship, out of friendship, out of friendship for the solitary one on the part of the solitary. Nietzsche already demanded this ‘community without community’, this bondless bond. And death is the supreme ordeal of this unbinding without which no friendship has ever seen the light of day. The book has as its epigraph these words of Georges Bataille:
… friends to the point of this state of profound friendship in which a forsaken man, forsaken by all his friends, meets in life he who will accompany him beyond life, himself lifeless, capable of free friendship, detached from all bonds.
The moment when the hyperbole seems to engage with the greatest risk, with respect to the inherited concept of friendship and all the politics that have ever spun out of it (Graeco-democratic or Christiano-revolutionary) is when the ‘without sharing’ and the ‘without reciprocity’ come to sign friendship, the response or the responsibility of friendship. Without sharing and without reciprocity, could one still speak of equality and fraternity? We are again quite close to Nietzsche, although we are already invited to think a proximity of the distant to which Zarathustra called us (he must have had to suppose it too, teleiopoetically) and always under the neutral and non-dialectizable law of the ‘pas’ [‘step’ or ‘not’] and the ‘X without X’.
And yet, to the proximity of the most distant, to the pressure of the most weightless, to the contact of what does not reach us – it is in friendship that I can respond, a friendship unshared, without reciprocity, friendship of that which has passed leaving no trace. This is passivity’s response to the un-presence of the unknown.27
How could such a ‘response’ ever translate into ethical or political responsibility, the one which, in the philosophical and Christian West, has always been associated with friendship? The preceding pages respond (admirably and from within the same ‘logic’) to this question of responsibility. As in the passage we have just quoted, they are written to and inspired by the figure of Lévinas, the other great friend, the other unique friend, in a friendship of thought which is not exclusively one of thought. If this language seems ‘impossible’ or untenable with regard to the common sense of friendship, where it has commanded all the canonical discourses we have mentioned thus far, it is also because it is written in terms of a writing of the disaster. The disaster is less friendship’s (for friendship) than one without which there is no friendship, the disaster at the heart of friendship, the disaster of friendship or disaster qua friendship. Star friendship (Sternen-Freundschaft).
Without being able to do justice here to these immense books, in particular L’Amitié or The Writing of the Disaster, let us fall back, under the sign of friendship, admiration and unmitigated gratitude, to several passages in which what is most enigmatic, if not most problematic, in friendship receives the keenest attention:
Let us do so in three steps, taking up three questions: (1) the question of the community; (2) the ‘Greek question’; (3) the question of fraternity.
1. The question of the community. It will be asked what ‘common’ can still mean as soon as friendship goes beyond all living community? What is being in common when it comes to friends only in dying? And what is it that renders this very value of the common valueless, valueless for thinking friendship, if not, fundamentally, this testamentary structure that we have constantly seen at work in all the great discourses on friendship? In order to think this ‘call to dying in common through separation’, Blanchot decides he must undo or suspend the gift, the very generosity of the promise which, according to Nietzsche, remained the essential feature of the friend to come. Here, we are no longer in affinity with Nietzsche – with one Nietzsche, in any case (for there is always more than one):
Friendship is not a gift, or a promise; it is not generic generosity. Rather, this incommensurable relation of one to the other is the outside drawing near in its separateness and inaccessibility. Desire, pure impure desire, is the call to bridge the distance, to die in common through separation, (p. 50)
Whatever can be thought of the gift or the promise from which such a friendship would free itself, from which it should indeed abstain, whatever can be thought of this duty or this possibility, it is true that in translating gift and promise by ‘generic generosity’, in associating them so closely – nothing could be less self-evident28 – risks are avoided, notably the political risks which, as we have pointed out, return incessantly: naturalization, the genericity of genre, race, gens, the family or the nation; and return, more precisely, with the features of fraternity. But once the necessity of all these neutralizations has been honoured (‘the outside drawing near in its separateness’, ‘pure impure desire’), once it has been clearly pointed out that the common is not the common of a given community but the pole or the end of a call (‘the call to bridge the distance, to die in common through separation’), the whole question remains: what is being called the call, and what is being called ‘common’? Why these words again, when they no longer mean what they were always thought to mean? When they still mean what they were believed not to mean – a meaning to which a memory, another memory, another friendship, ought to awaken them again? The question is not only the one which brings on semantic vertigo, but the one which asks ‘what is to be done?’: What is to be done today, politically, with this vertigo and its necessity? What is to be done with the ‘what is to be done?’? And what other politics – which would nevertheless still be a politics, supposing the word could still resist this very vertigo – can this other communality of the ‘common’ dictate to us?
This type of question envelops another. If, through ‘the call to die in common through separation’, this friendship is borne beyond being-in-common, beyond being-common or sharing, beyond all common appurtenance (familial, neighbourhood, national, political, linguistic and finally generic appurtenance), beyond the social bond itself – if that is possible – then why elect, if only passively, this other with whom I have no relation of this type rather than some other with whom I have none of the sort either? Why would I call this foreigner my friend (for we are speaking of this absolute foreigner, if only the neighbourhood foreigner, the foreigner within my family) and not the other? Why am I not the friend of just anyone? Am I not, moreover, just that, in subscribing to such a strong and at the same time disarming and disarmed proposition? There could never be any appeasing response to this question, of course. But the hypothesis can come up that, if this is the way things are, it is because the friendship announced in this language, the one promised or promising without promising anything, is perhaps of the order neither of the common nor of its opposite, neither appurtenance nor non-appurtenance, sharing or non-sharing, proximity or distance, the outside or the inside, etc. Nor therefore, in a word, that of the community. Not because it would be a community without community, ‘unavowable’ or ‘inoperative’, etc., but simply because it would have nothing to do, with regard to what is essential in that which is called friendship, with the slightest reference to community, whether positive, negative, or neutral. This would (perhaps) mean that the aporia requiring the unceasing neutralization of one predicate by another (relation without relation, community without community, sharing without sharing, etc.) calls on significations altogether different from those of the part shared or held in common, regardless of the sign – positive, negative or neutral – assigned to them. This desire (‘pure, impure desire’) which, in lovence – friendship or love – engages me with a particular him or her rather than with anybody or with all hims and all hers, which engages me with these men and these women (and not with all of either and not with just anyone), which engages me with a singular ‘who’, be it a certain number of them, a number that is always small, whichever it is, with regard to ‘all the others’, this desire of the call to bridge the distance (necessarily unbridgeable) is (perhaps) no longer of the order of the common or the community, the share taken up or given, participation or sharing. Whatever the sentence constructed with these words (affirmative, negative, neutral or suspensive), it would never be related to what we persist in naming with these well-worn words: lovence, friendship, love, desire. Consequently, if there were a politics of this lovence, it would no longer imply the motifs of community, appurtenance or sharing, whatever the sign assigned to them. Affirmed, negated or neutralized, these ‘communitarian’ or ‘communal’ values always risk bringing a brother back. Perhaps this risk must be assumed in order to keep the question of the ‘who’ from being politically enframed by the schema of being-common or being-in-common, even when it is neutralized, in a question of identity (individual, subjective, ethnic, national, state, etc.). The law of number and of the ‘more than one’ which goes all through this book would not be any less crucial and ineluctable but it would, then, call for an altogether other language.
2. The Greek question. Despite the infinite distance separating his thought of friendship from what we have called, all the way to its hyperbolic paradoxes, the Greek ‘model’ of friendship, and no doubt from the very idea of a ‘model’, why does Blanchot see fit, at one moment, to praise Greek philía, the ‘exalted virtue’ it demands and which is found only in ‘a few of us’? Why is it precisely when he too is speaking of philía as a ‘model’ (Blanchot’s term) that he quotes in turn Aristotle’s sentence in its canonical version (‘O my friends, there is no friend’)? But this time, having taken account of everything we have just heard, the ‘there is no friend’ can and must become laden with the newest and most rebellious of significations: there is no longer a friend in the sense of what the entire tradition has taught us.
And yet. And yet, a certain heritage is still affirmed, reaffirmed, providing it is ‘still capable of being enriched’. We shall first read this passage, but its sheer existence indeed attests to – rather, confirms – the fact that no actual rupture is possible, determinable, even advisable, even from the greatest distancing, and that the history we are referring to is not articulated in this way.
In question again is a sort of epigraph. Here are the last pages of Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him,29 a text first written for a journal, ‘the day following Foucault’s death’:
… asked about his projects, he [Foucault] suddenly exclaimed: ‘Oh! First I’m going to concern myself with myself!’ His comment is not easy to elucidate, even if one considers a bit hastily that, like Nietzsche, he was inclined to seek in the Greeks less a civic morality than an individual ethic permitting him to make of his life – what remained of it for him to live – a work of art. And it was thus he would be tempted to call on the ancients for a revalorization of the practices of friendship, which, although never lost, have not again recaptured, except for a few of us, their exalted virtue. Philía, which, for the Greeks and even Romans, remains the model of what is excellent in human relations (with the enigmatic character it receives from opposite imperatives, at once pure reciprocity and unrequited generosity), can be received as a heritage always capable of being enriched. Friendship was perhaps promised to Foucault as a posthumous gift, beyond passions, beyond problems of thought, beyond the dangers of life that he experienced more for others than for himself. In bearing witness to a work demanding study (unprejudiced reading) rather than praise, I believe I am remaining faithful, however awkwardly, to the intellectual friendship that his death, so painful for me, today allows me to declare to him, as I recall the words attributed by Diogenes Laertes to Aristotle: ‘Oh my friends, there is no friend.’
Instead of giving in to the indecency of the cold reading of the rhetoritician which would uncover the sublime calculations imposed on this extraordinary declaration of friendship in mourning, instead of analysing the writing of a ‘so painful’ fervour which still submits to the obligation of weighing each word on the scene (the concession, the parentheses, the ‘perhaps’, the strict qualification of an essentially ‘intellectual’ friendship, etc.), let us limit ourselves to two points.
1. First of all, the theme is indeed that of the Greek ‘model’. As it seems hardly compatible with the thought of friendship which Blanchot, in L’Amitié and elsewhere (especially in The Writing of the Disaster), had carried to the extremity of an uncompromising and, at the same time, gentle rigour, the entire effort – not to say the painful torsion – of this epigraph will consist in emphasizing above all: (1) the aporias which make this Greek model scarcely readable, enigmatic if not objectionable; and (2) the necessity, by way of consequence, of not receiving this heritage, in any case not without transforming it or enriching it (no doubt to the point of contradicting it at the heart of its contradiction). As this unconditional allusion to an ‘exalted virtue’ which he, in sum, promotes – this ‘exalted virtue’ that ‘a few of us’ have ‘recaptured’ – is, in Blanchot’s work, undoubtedly a hapax, the eulogy of ‘the model of what is excellent in human relations’ can only be immediately blurred, complicated, neutralized (‘with the enigmatic character it receives from opposite imperatives, at once pure reciprocity and unrequited generosity’). Since everything Blanchot has thought and written elsewhere on friendship should lead him to wish not to inherit from this model, the allusion to a heritage which is nevertheless necessary or indisputable must take place under the condition that the heritage be ‘enriched’, ‘always capable of being enriched’, and, since the heritage has ‘opposite imperatives’, let us understand enriched by the very thing it is not or which it excludes from within itself. For what else could ever enrich one, if not what one is not, what one does not have, what one can neither have or have been? The Greek model of philía could never be ‘enriched’ otherwise than with that which it has violently and essentially attempted to exclude.
2. Does the formal structure – this time formal more than thematic – does the composition, not to say the rhetoric, of these two pages not confirm this profound indecision, as if one could neither inherit nor not inherit what is left for us to inherit, the heritage of a culture, the heritage of a friend? Of course, it was necessary to speak of the Greek affair, notably because Foucault, for whose memory this text pre-eminently wants itself to be and describes itself as intended, was working on it before his death (and although philía remains strangely marginalized, not to say left in silence, in his last works, at least those published to date). But what is literally retained, in a declaration which means to bear witness to a work rather than to a person (‘in bearing witness to a work’), for a work for which the question is not partisan praise (for it ‘demands study (unprejudiced reading) rather than praise’30), that which is kept in what finally is such a problematic heritage – this cumbersome model of Greek philía – is a reported sentence, and one which says what? – that there is no friend. The testimony of friendship (of ‘intellectual friendship’) is declared in the form of a sentence recalling that there is no friend, which neutralizes the declaration of friendship, pluralizes the address (O friends) and leaves the Greek model to put itself, by itself, into question. All by itself – this is what the model does best. Blanchot keeps the address. He does not speak of the friend or of friends, he speaks to Foucault, but to a dead Foucault to whom he thus declares, presently (‘posthumous gift’ of a ‘friendship’ ‘perhaps promised’), and in the plural: ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ What is thus declared presently to Foucault (‘today allows me to declare to him’), that is, the ‘intellectual friendship’ to which Blanchot ‘believes he is remaining faithful’, is thus accompanied (without accompanying itself), following a colon, by a time of remembrance (‘I recall’). But a time of remembrance which recalls, no doubt out of modesty and reserve, less the friend than the saying attributed to Aristotle which says there is no friend. The incredible audacity of this ‘as’ [tandis que], following a colon, opens a solitary subordinate clause; it suspends the entire declaration in an epokhē of this intemporal time which is suited to mourning but also annuls in advance everything that could indeed be said in this saying and declared in this declaration. A colon: will an act of punctuation ever have unfurled a veil of mourning in this way, suspending even the logical sequence, letting only contiguity appear, the contemporaneousness of two temporal orders simply juxtaposed, without an inner relation between them? Will one ever have punctuated with more rigour, economy, reserve, even leaving open the hypothesis (but let us not dwell on this here) that there, perhaps, no one is around for anyone any longer, and that this is indeed death, this dying of which Blanchot has complained, so often, so profoundly, not that it is fatal but that it remains impossible? Like friendship, perhaps: ‘I believe I am remaining faithful, however awkwardly, to the intellectual friendship that his death, so painful for me, today allows me to declare to him, as I recall the words attributed by Diogenes Laertes to Aristotle: “Oh my friends, there is no friend.’” This is shown (performatively), by the fact, attested here, that this friendship could not have been declared during the lifetime of the friend. It is death that ‘today allows me’ to ‘declare’ this ‘intellectual friendship’, ‘as…’. May thanks be given to death. It is thanks to death that friendship can be declared. Never before, never otherwise. And never if not in recalling (while thanks to death, the friend recalls that there are no friends). And when friendship is declared during the lifetime of friends, it avows, fundamentally, the same thing: it avows the death thanks to which the chance to declare itself comes at last, never failing to come.
Without seeking to conceal it, it will have been undersood that I wish to speak here of those men and women to whom a bond of friendship unites me – that is, I also want to speak to them. If only through the rare friendship I am naming, which always occasions in me a surge of admiration and gratitude. To my knowledge, among the aforementioned, those who cite Aristotle’s quasi-citation, always in the canonical version, there is, besides Maurice Blanchot, Michel Deguy. In a more Roman tradition (a Latin quotation) whose path he has not indicated to me, Deguy concentrates on the Aristotelian reminder, against Plato, of the singularity of this, of this friend. Let us cease speaking of friendship, of the eídos of friendship; let us speak of friends. This is the enormous vein, the inexhaustible tópos of the quarrel Aristotle believed it was necessary to pick with Plato’s ghost. Now here we have what is happening to us today with the ruin which affects us and which we have adopted as our theme: this collapse of the friendship concept will perhaps be a chance, but, along with Friendship, the collapse carries off the Friend too, and there is nothing fortuitous in the fact that the sudden burst of this chance at the heart of the ruin is still linked, in what in our time is most untimely, to literature, to the ‘literary community’, of which The Unavowable Community also speaks. (Is not literature today, in the saturation of a geopolitical process of a becoming-worldwide [mondialité], the very thing which remains intolerable to the intolerance of the theological-political systems for which, the idea of democracy having no unconditional virtue, no speech can elude the space of theological-political authority? Absolute theologization qua absolute politicization?) For it is above all a question of poetry and literature in the pages Deguy devotes to ‘O amid mei’, and the word ‘literature’ is the only word, along with ‘friendship’, or with the singularity of ‘this one’, that he wishes to underscore:
O amici mei
If a certain Latin tradition is to be believed on this subject – O Amid mei, sicut Aristoteles dicere solitus est, nullus est amicus! – it is under the heading of friendship that Aristotle undertook to ruin the capital letters of Platonism, and called to the witness stand the ousia prôtê: this man. O my friends, there is no Friend.31
Under the sign of the capital letter in ruins, where Friendship should give way to friends who henceforth no longer answer the call to the witness stand, a narrative could follow (for it would be a question of narrative, signed by someone who presents himself, with all due irony, as a reader for ‘a major publisher’, the same one, as a matter of fact, which houses the great work of Bataille and Blanchot). The narrative would be prepared only ‘to tell stories of the monuments and ruins of friendship’. Such a hypothesis is handled, poetically and philosophically, through a number of themes which have appeared to us, up until now, to embody the enigma: sexual difference, misogyny and the monastic order of ‘brothers’ (‘What is thought of love can be said in favour of friendship, the alibi allows one to speak of the amiable. There are two conditions conducive to the firing of the spirit: that of the “Muse”, prosopeia of eros, and now “libido”, and sexual difference forces poetry to cry out its adieu: “A single being is absent and everything comes alive …”. The second is the womanless condition, outside of difference, and this is the monastic flame-up of the spirit, “philosophy”, which sometimes takes flight from out of a little misogyny (which can be misandry in the community of women)’), the ‘free and dissymmetrical relationship’ of the ‘most generous’, again from out of a ‘dying in common’ (‘… singing over dying together’), and lastly, above all, the war of friendship between family and literature:
Most men will have existed only through and for their families; when men live and die in being loved, commented on, at times a little deplored. Among the despairing attempts to exist beyond the family: writing, or … loving; which carries off, alters, adulters. Of the other, an other, truly other, ravishes: it is a god. And see how, as soon as they are torn away from the family by love, they found a family. Unless they die in loving, loving to die, Tristan and Juliet, this is the choice left them by literature.
(Remember, says the conjugal quarrel, that we are not of the same family. And this is why we have never really spoken of the same thing.)
3. Lastly, fraternity. What can the name ‘brother’ or the call to fraternity still mean when one or the other arises in the speech of friendship which, like that of Blanchot – at least in his L’Amitié or The Writing of the Disaster – has so radically delivered itself from the hold of all determined communities, all filiation or affiliation, all alliances – families or peoples – and even all given generality, if only by a ‘gift, a promise, a generic generosity’? We have already noted that allusions to fraternity are rare in Blanchot. But for this very reason, for this reason as well, these allusions are worth dwelling upon. Besides the brief, obviously affirmative, connotations we have already examined in The Unavowable Community,32 a particular generous declaration of friendship addressed to the Jews and to Judaism requires us to question what it says or does not say of the friendship of which L’Amitié speaks:
It is obviously the Nazi persecution (which was in operation from the beginning, unlike what certain professors of philosophy would wish to convince us of – to have us believe that in 1933, when Heidegger joined, national-socialism was still a proper, suitable doctrine, not deserving of condemnation) which made us feel that the Jews were our brothers and that Judaism was more than a culture and even more than a religion, but, rather, the foundation of our relationships with the other [autrui].33
I shall not hazard an interpretation of this definition of Judaism, although I sense both its highly problematic character and its imposing necessity (which is of course unquestionable, from the moment one decides to call Judaism the very thing one thus defines: a question of a circle with which we cannot here engage again). Putting aside, then, what is most difficult in this definition, but supposing, precisely, that Judaism is ‘the foundation of our relationships with others’, then – and this will be my only question – what does ‘brothers’ mean in this context? Why would autrui be in the first place a brother? And especially, why ‘our brothers’? Whose brothers? Who, then, are we? Who is this ‘we’?
(Reading this sentence, and always in view of the admiring and grateful friendship which binds me to the author, I was wondering, among other questions (more than one): why could I never have written that, nor subscribed to it, whereas, relying on other criteria, this declaration would be easier for me to subscribe to than several others? In the same vein, I was wondering why the word ‘community’ (avowable or unavowable, inoperative or not) – why I have never been able to write it, on my own initiative and in my name, as it were. Why? Whence my reticence? And is it not fundamentally the essential part of the disquiet which inspires this book? Is this reserve, with respect to the above definition of Judaism, insufficiently Jewish, or, on the contrary, hyperbolically Jewish, more than Jewish? What, then, once again, does ‘Judaism’ mean? I add that the language of fraternity seems to me just as problematic when, reciprocally, Lévinas uses it to extend humanity to the Christian, in this case to Abbot Pierre: ‘the fraternal humanity of the stalag’s confidential agent who, by each of his movements, restored in us the consciousness of our dignity. The man was called Abbot Pierre, I never learned his family name.’34)
It is rather late in the day now to issue a warning. Despite the appearances that this book has multiplied, nothing in it says anything against the brother or against fraternity. No protest, no contestation. Maligning and cursing, as we have seen often enough, still appertain to the inside of the history of brothers (friends or enemies, be they false or true). This history will not be thought, it will not be recalled, by taking up this side. In my own special way, like everyone else, I believe, I no doubt love, yes, in my own way, my brother, my only brother. And my brothers, dead or alive, where the letter no longer counts and never has, in my ‘family’ and in my ‘families’ – I have more than one, and more than one ‘brother’ of more than one sex, and I love having more than one, each time unique, of whom and to whom, in more than one language, across quite a few boundaries, I am bound by a conjuration and so many unuttered oaths.
Where, then, is the question? Here it is: I have never stopped asking myself, I request that it be asked, what is meant when one says ‘brother’, when someone is called ‘brother’. And when the humanity of man, as much as the alterity of the other, is thus resumed and subsumed. And the infinite price of friendship. I have wondered, and I ask, what one wants to say whereas one does not want to say, one knows that one should not say, because one knows, through so much obscurity, whence it comes and where this profoundly obscure language has led in the past. Up until now. I am wondering, that’s all, and request that it be asked, what the implicit politics of this language is. For always, and today more than ever. What is the political impact and range of this chosen word, among other possible words, even – and especially – if the choice is not deliberate?
Just a question, but one which supposes an affirmation. If my hypothesis must remain a hypothesis, it cannot be undone with a pledge. The pledge of a testimony irreducible to proof or certitude, as well as to all theoretical determination. If one wishes to retranslate this pledge into a hypothesis or a question, it would, then, perhaps – by way of a temporary conclusion – take the following form: is it possible to think and to implement democracy, that which would keep the old name ‘democracy’, while uprooting from it all these figures of friendship (philosophical and religious) which prescribe fraternity: the family and the androcentric ethnic group? Is it possible, in assuming a certain faithful memory of democratic reason and reason tout court – I would even say, the Enlightenment of a certain Aufklärung (thus leaving open the abyss which is again opening today under these words) – not to found, where it is not longer a matter of founding, but to open out to the future, or rather, to the ‘come’, of a certain democracy?
For democracy remains to come; this is its essence in so far as it remains: not only will it remain indefinitely perfectible, hence always insufficient and future, but, belonging to the time of the promise, it will always remain, in each of its future times, to come: even when there is democracy, it never exists, it is never present, it remains the theme of a non-presentable concept. Is it possible to open up to the ‘come’ of a certain democracy which is no longer an insult to the friendship we have striven to think beyond the homo-fraternal and phallogocentric schema?
When will we be ready for an experience of freedom and equality that is capable of respectfully experiencing that friendship, which would at last be just, just beyond the law, and measured up against its measurelessness?