1. In particular before the American Philosophical Association in Washington, in 1988, and for a colloquium of the Jan Hus Association at the French Institute in Prague, in 1990.
2. In the form of an article (in English: ‘Politics of Friendship’, in The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LXXXV, no.11, November 1988, New York; a longer version of this article appeared in American Imago, Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture, vol. 50, Fall 1993, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, special issue on Love, Thomas Keenan, Special Editor, trans. G. Motzkin, M. Syrotinski and Thomas Keenan; in Italian, in Aut Aut, March-April 1991, 242, trans. M. Ferraris, Milan); and in Czech in book form (Politiky Přátelství, trans. K. Thein, Philosophia, Prague 1994).
1. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays [trans. M.A. Screech, Allen Lane, Penguin Press, London 1991].
2. Cicero, Laelius de Amicitia, [trans. F.O. Copley, On Friendship, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, University of Michigan Press 1971], p. 56. For the numerous translations we will henceforth be quoting, the following rule will be followed, no revision or modification (one always says: ‘slightly’ modified) of any kind, nor additions in parentheses from the original text except when we deem them indispensable for the clarity of our argument.
3. Ibid.
4. Eudemian Ethics, 1234b, 18 ff. [Revised Oxford trans.]
5. A fortunate coincidence: in the seminar that I am following here, I believed the word aimance indispensable for the naming of a third or first voice, the so-called middle voice, on the near or far side of loving (friendship or love), of activity or passivity, decision or passion. Now, luckily, I come across this word, invented by a friend, a poet-thinker I admire: Abdelkebir Khatibi, who sings this new word in Dédicace à l’année qui vient [Dedication to the Upcoming Year], Fata Morgana 1986: ‘I will have desired only aimance, lovence’, ‘our law of lovence’, ‘on the frontiers of lovence’, ‘Go and come in the cycle of lovence’, ‘Lovence, Lovence.… The only word I ever invented/In the sentence of my life?’. He recalls the word at the beginning of Par-dessus l’épaule [Over the Shoulder], Aubier 1988, which presents ‘lovence in two sequences, one addressed to women, and the other to men’.
6. Eudemian Ethics, 1234b 21.
7. 1234b 18–20.
8. 1235a 5.
9. 1234b 22–3.
10. 1239a 33–4.
11. Ibid.
12. 1237a 35–40.
13. 1239a 27–30.
14. For example, Eudemian Ethics, 1239a 4, 20; Nicomachean Ethics, 1159b [revised Oxford trans.].
15. Eudemian Ethics, 1239a 36; Nicomachean Ethics, 1159a 30.
16. Eudemian Ethics, 1159a 29.
17. 1239a 40; 1239b 1–2.
18. 1237a 40, 1239b 1–2.
19. Ibid.
20. 1237b 17.
21. 1237b 13.
22. 1237b 10–15
23. Plato, The Banquet, 182c.
24. Plato, Timaeus, 37b.
25. Eudemian Ethics, 1237b 15.
26. For these distinctions marked notably by Heidegger, and for the questions they bring up, allow me to refer to ‘Comment ne pas parler’ in Psyché, Inventions de l’autre, Galilée 1987, pp. 586 ff. [‘How to Avoid Speaking’, in Languages of the Unsayable, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, trans. Ken Frieden, Columbia University Press, New York.] What I called elsewhere iterability might not dissolve this alternative but might at least give access to a structure of experience in which the two poles of the alternative cease to oppose one another to form another node, another ‘logic’, another ‘chronology’, another history, another relation to the order of orders.
27. Eudemian Ethics, 1237b 30–34.
28. 1237b 34, 1238a 3.
29. 1238a 5–10.
30. 1238a 10–15.
31. 1238a 30.
1. ‘Seine Feinde lieben? Ich glaube, das ist gut gelernt worden: es geschieht heute tausendfaltig.’ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil [trans. R. Hollingdale, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1981, 216].
2. ‘Das Leben des Feindes. – Wer davon lebt, einen Feind zu bekampfen, hat ein Interesse daran, dass er am Leben bleibt.’ Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, A Book for Free Spirits [trans. R. Hollingdale, Cambridge Unversity Press 1986], 1, 531.
3. The seminar whose first session I am following here will have in fact proposed twelve variations or twelve modalities of reception of the ‘same sentence’. Perhaps someday I will prepare this for publication.
4. ‘… und vielleicht kommt jedem auch einmal die freudigere Stunde, wo er sagt
“Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde! so rief der sterbende Weise;
“Feinde, es gibt keinen Feind!” ruf ich, der lebende Tor.’
Human All Too Human, 1, ‘376: Of friends’ [trans. R. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 149], Emphasis added.
5. Beyond the timid prolegomena that we are amassing here with reference to Nietzsche, a systematic study of the ‘category’, if it is one, should be undertaken, the ‘category’ or the ‘modality’ of the ‘perhaps’ in all languages and in all the world’s cultures. In a very fine essay on Heidegger, Rodolphe Gasché begins by recalling the disdain with which classical philosophy considers the recourse to ‘perhaps’. He sees in this disdain – as for Hegel in his awful sarcasms against the unfortunate Krug – a pre-philosophical failure, an empiricist slip back into the approximate formulations of ordinary language. ‘Perhaps’ would belong to a vocabulary which should remain outside philosophy. That is to say, outside certainty, truth, even outside veracity. In this respect, the philosopher himself echoes the common sense of the German proverb which says: ‘Perhaps is practically a lie’ (or a half-truth?) (Vielleichit ist eine halbe Luge). Having recalled the German etymology of vielleichit (villithe in Middle High German gathers the significations of sehr leidit (easy), vermutlich (probably, conceivably), and moglicherweise (possibly), which marked then, more so than now, an expectancy, not a simple possibility and, as Grimm takes note of, the presumed possibility that a statement might correspond to a reality or that something will happen, as Gasché translates: thus perhaps), and before dealing with the abundant use that Heidegger makes of vielleicht in one of the essays in Unterwegs zur Spradie, Gasché poses the question which is of the utmost interest to us here: ‘And what if perhaps modalized a discourse which no longer proceeds by statements (declarations, affirmations, assertions) without being for all that less rigorous than the discourse of philosophy?’ (‘Perhaps – a Modality? On the Way with Heidegger to Language’, in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 1993, p. 469).
6. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1st part, On the prejudices of philosophers’, 2.
7. Ibid.
8. See Bonnie Homg, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 66–9 (‘Nietzsche’s Recovery of Virtue as Virtù’).
9. Beyond Good and Evil, p. 135.
10. Ibid., para. 214.
11. On the Prejudices of Philosophers’, para. 2.
12. Ibid., para. 42.
13. “Freund. – Mitfreude, nich Mitleiden, macht den Freund’, Human All Too Human, para. 499: ‘Fellow rejoicing, not fellow suffering, makes the friend.’
14. In one of the most blinding passages of The Writing of Disaster, Blanchot evokes (with the audacity and prudence required here) ‘certain commentators’ of ‘Jewish messianism’, where Jewish messianism ‘suggests the relation between the event and its nonoccurrence’ :
If the Messiah is at the gates of Rome among the beggars and lepers, one might think that his incognito protects or prevents him from coming, but, precisely, he is recognized; someone, haunted with questioning and unable to leave off, asks him: ‘When will you come?’ His being there is, then, not the coming With the Messiah, who is there, the call must always resound ‘Come, Come.’ His presence is no guarantee. Both future and past (it is said, at least once, that the Messiah has already come), his coming does not correspond to any presence at all . . And should it happen that, to the question, ‘When will your coming take place’ die Messiah responds ‘It is today’, the answer is certainly impressive: so, it is today! It is now and always now. There is no waiting, although this is as an obligation to wait And when is now? When is the now which does not belong to ordinary time … does not maintain but destabilizes it? . ., L’Écriture du désastre, Gallimard 1980, pp 214–15 [trans. Ann Smock, The Writing of Disaster, University of Nebraska Press, New Bison Book Edition 1995, pp. 141–2 (trans, modified)].
15. It is well known that these words are Bataille’s. Why do we quote them here? In order to bear witness – too briefly, shabbily – to the grateful attention that draws me to those thinkers and texts to which I am bound without ever being their equal. Without hope, then, of ever giving them their due here. These words of Bataille are chosen by Blanchot as an epigraph to La Communauté inavouable, Éditions du Minuit, 1983 [The Unavoidable Community, trans. Pierre Jons, Tarrytown, NY: Station Hill Press 1988], a work which, from the very first lines, is in conversation with an article by Jean-Luc Nancy which later become a book: La Communauté désoeuvrée, Bourgois 1986, 1990 [The Inoperative Community, University of Minnesota Press 1991]. Like Blanchot’s L’Amitié (Gallimard 1971), which we will take up later, this is yet another book on friendship, in particular friendship according to Bataille (see, for example, pp. 40 ff.). As those towards which or from which they shine in so singular a fashion, these works are no doubt among those that count the most for me today. Without being able to refer to them here as abundantly and directly as would be necessary, I would at least like to situate my subject with regard to what they have staked out: to pre-name, singularly around the texts of Nietzsche that I am attempting to read here, a seismic event whose ‘new logic’ leaves its mark on all the necessarily contradictory and undecidable statements that organize these discourses and give them their paradoxical force. A paradigm here might be, for example, this ‘community of those without community’, ‘the inoperative operation of the work’, like all the ‘X without X’ that open up the sense at the heart of these thoughts. These thoughts invent themselves by countersigning, according to the teleiopoesis that we have been referring to, the event signed ‘Nietzsche’. They belong – but the word is not appropriate – they belong without belonging to the untimely time of Nietzsche. I could have placed the following as epigraph to this entire essay, in any case to that part dealing with Nietzsche, taken from ‘The Negative Community’ in The Unavowable Community:
For example, Bataille says: ‘The community I am speaking of is that which will exist virtually from the fact of Nietzsche’s existence (which is the demand for such a community) and that each of Nietzsche’s readers undoes by shirking – that is, by not solving the posed enigma (by not even reading it)’ But there was a huge difference between Bataille and Nietzsche Nietzsche had an ardent desire to be heard, but also the sometimes haughty certitude of being the bearer of a truth too dangerous and too superior to be able to be embraced. For Bataille, friendship is a part of the ‘sovereign operation’; it is no accident that Le Coupable has at the very beginning the subtitle, Friendship; friendship, it is true, is difficult to define friendship for oneself to the point of dissolution, friendship from one to another, as the passage and affirmation of a continuity starting from the necessary discontinuity. But reading – the inoperative operation of the work – is not absent from it. (pp. 41–2)
Further on, Blanchot insists on the fact that ‘these movements are only apparently contradictory’. ‘What is then the case concerning friendship? Friendship: friendship for the unknown [one] without friends’ (p. 44; original emphasis).
In subscribing in turn, in countersigning, in taking it seriously, as I have always done, the necessity of these ‘apparently contradictory’ statements, I would like to return (for example, here with Nietzsche) not to some archaeological ground or platform summoned to support them (by definition this ground always gives way, escapes) but to an event that opens up a world in which we must today, now, write in this way, and deliver ourselves over to this necessity. As we are doing.
Then, yes, what I will say – starting from and on the subject of Nietzsche, and in his favour also – will be a salute to the friends I have just quoted or named. What I will say against Nietzsche also, perhaps – for example when, later, I will protest against the evidence and the guarantees that he still gives for such fraternization. There is still perhaps some brotherhood in Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy, and I wonder, in the innermost recess of my admiring friendship, if it does not deserve a little loosening up, and if it should still guide the thinking of the community, be it a community without community, or a brotherhood without brotherhood. ‘The heart of brotherhood’, for example, which, in the last words of ‘The Negative Community’, still lays down the law: … ‘not by chance, but as the heart of brotherhood: the heart or the law’. I am also thinking – without being too sure what to think – about all the assembled ‘brothers’, all the men ‘gathered into fraternities,’ in The Inoperative Community, when ‘The Interrupted Myth’ is taken up (pp. 109, 111, 112). Must not the interruption of this mythical scene also, by some supplement to the question concerning what transpires ‘before the law’, at the mythical moment of the father’s murder (from Freud to Kafka), reach and affect the figure of the brothers?
16. See my De l’esprit, Heidegger et la question, Galilée 1987 [Of Spirit, Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby, University of Chicago Press 1989, p. 129.]; and, notably, ‘Nombres de oui’, in Psyché, Galilée, 1987, pp. 644–50 [trans. Brian Holmes, ‘A number of yes,’ in Qui Parle, 2, 2:120–33].
17. In particular, in Donner le temps, Galilée 1991, [trans. Peggy Kamuf: Given Time, University of Chicago Press 1992].
18. Beyond Good and Evil, 2, para. 44.
19. Ibid, [for the last two quotations].
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., para. 43.
1. Comment tirer profit de ses ennemies [How to Take Advantage of One’s Enemies], trans. P. Maréchaux, Payot 1993, pp. 33–4.
2. Le Lièvre, ses Amis et les Deux Chevreuils, Fables [The Hare, His Friends, and the Two Roebucks, Fables], Book III, Fable VII.
3. Human All Too Human, 2, para. 376.
4. Ibid.; emphasis added.
5. Ibid., 2, para. 252.
6. Le Pas au-delà, Gallimard 1973, p. 107.
7. Human All Too Human. 2, para. 251.
8. [These passages have not, to my knowledge, been published in English translation. Derrida cites them from: Par-delà bien et mal, Oeuvres philosophiques complètes, Gallimard 1971, vol. VII, pp. 362–3 – Trans.]
9. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarne and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row 1962, para. 62, p. 356.
10. The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, Vintage 1974, para. 374.
11. Human All Too Human, 2, para. 248.
12. The Gay Science, 1, 8, ‘Unconscious virtues’.
13. Human All Too Human, 2, ‘Assorted opinions and maxims’, para. 241.
14. The Gay Science, para. 61.
15. The Gay Science, 4, para. 289.
16. The Gay Science, 1, 14, ‘The things people call love’.
17. Mémoires – for Paul de Man [trans, by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava and Peggy Kamuf, Columbia University Press, New York, second edition, 1989, p. 150],
18. See Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, pp. 17, 78.
19. See ‘To forgive Enemies H{ayley} does pretend/Who never in his Life forgave a friend,’ William Blake, Complete Poems, Penguin Classics, p. 617. See also, pp. 617–18, ‘On H{ayley}s Friendship’ and ‘To H{ayley}’: ‘Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake/Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake.’
20. William Blake, Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion, ibid., pp. 635, 642, 643. Everything would have to be reread. For example: ‘Each man is in His Spectres power/Until the arrival of that hour/When his Humanity awake/And Cast his own Spectre into the Lake,’ p. 494; or this: ‘Never shalt thou a [lover] true love find/My Spectre follows thee Behind,’ p. 495. Is Stirner so far off? Spectral affinities, the friendship of ghosts. And Marx?
1. Human All Too Human, 2, Assorted opinions and maxims, 242, p. 274.
2. ‘As for the name … that is called democracy’, in L’Invention d’Athènes. Histoire de l’oraison funèbre dans la ‘cité dassique’, 1981, second edition, Payot, 1993, pp. 225, 227. [The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 1986, pp. 217, 219.]
3. La Boétie, ‘To Michel de Montaigne’.
4. In order to limit at least one inevitable ambiguity, let us say immediately and straightforwardly that the deconstructive reading of Schmittian thought that we shall attempt here will keep two convictions in view.
The first concerns the undeniable link between this thinking of the political and political thought on the one hand and, on the other, Schmitt’s political commitments, those which led to his arrest and conviction after the war. In many respects, these commitments often appear more serious and more repugnant than those of Heidegger (see, for instance, his anti-Semitic declarations on the ‘Jewish falsifications of the concept of spirit’ quoted by Habermas in ‘German Idealism and its Jewish Thinkers’, Profiles philosophiques et politiques, TEL, Gallimard 1974, p. 83; and, more recently, ‘Le besoin d’une continuité allemande. Carl Schmitt dans l’histoire des idées politiques de la RFA [‘The Need for German Continuity. Carl Schmitt in the History of Political Ideas in the GFR] in Les Temps modernes, no. 575, June 1994).
But the second conviction is that thus should not distract us from a serious reading, nor keep us from taking up a thought and a work so deeply rooted in the richest tradition of the theological, juridical, political and philosophical culture of Europe, in that of a European law of which this Catholic thinker (who probably remained a Nazi for a much longer period of time than he publicly confessed, and no doubt remained anti-Semitic for the rest of his life – and the forms of his anti-Semitism were extremely virulent) claimed to be the last – fervent – advocate. To exactly this extent this thought and this work repeatedly presaged the fearsome world that was announcing itself from as as early as the 1920s. As though the fear of seeing that which comes to pass take place in effect had honed the gaze of this besieged watchman. Following our hypothesis, the scene would be thus: lucidity and fear not only drove this terrified and insomniac watcher to anticipate the storms and seismic movements that would wreak havoc with the historical field, the political space, the borders of concepts and countries, the axiomatics of European law, the bonds between the tellurian and the political, the technical and the political, the media and parliamentary democracy, etc. Such a ‘watcher’ would thereby have been more attuned than so many others to the fragility and ‘deconstructible’ precariousness of structures, borders and axioms that he wished to protect, restore and ‘conserve’ at all costs. This lucidity – that is, the courage of his fear – also led him to multiply, in the panic of a defensive strategy, the most paradoxical of alliances, thereby revealing formal combinations whose possibility is still today in the greatest need of meditation: how does the most uncompromisingly conservative discourse, that of Schmitt, manage to affirm, in certain respects, so many affinities with what are apparently, from Lenin to Mao, the most revolutionary movements of our time? Who would have been their common enemy? And how can one explain the interest in Schmitt shown by a certain extreme-left-wing movement, in more than one country? How is this still-active influence to be explained, despite so many trials? There is more to be learned from these equivocations than from many right-minded denunciations that take shelter behind a chronic wave of contagious or objective alliances. These indolent denunciations often use this disquiet and the empirically established fact of ‘evil influences’ as a pretext, without having anything else to say on the matter, for shirking and for deterring others from the task of reading, from the work and from the question. Those who are satisfied with mere denunciation too often conceal their apathy and misapprehension – indeed, their denial of the very thing that Schmitt at least, in his own way, through his reactive panic, apprehended. Which way was that? This is what we would like to consider temporarily.
5. Under this title, we will be referring regularly to Der Begriff des Politisdien (1932), reissued in 1963, and once again in 1974, by Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, with the subtitle ‘Text von 1932 mit einem Vorword und drei Corollarien’, as well as to the French translation, La Notion du Politique, Théorie du Partisan, trans. M.-L. Steinhauser, with a preface by J. Freund, Flammarion 1992. We have again slightly modified this translation, at several points. We will indicate each time the page number of the original followed by the page number of the translation. [Translated into English by George Schwab as The Concept of the Political, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey 1976; hereafter CP. The page numbers following those of the original will be from this edition.]
6. On the relationship between Schmitt and Strauss, see Heinrich Meier, ‘Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss und “Der Begriff des Politischen”. Zu einen Dialog unter Alwesenden.’ This work contains Strauss’s paper on The Concept of the Political [which is found in English translation at the end of the English edition of Schmitt’s work] and three unpublished letters of 1932–33.
7. Ibid., p. 26; p. 26.
8. Ibid, p. 29; p. 28 [translation modified],
9. Ibid., pp. 33–5; pp. 34–7. Further on, to warn against the confusion that may ensue, Schmitt recalls the profound analogy between theological and political postulates. He then speaks, concerning the friend–enemy distinction, of ‘effectivity-actuality or of real possibility’ (die reale Wirklichkeit oder Mȯglichkeit der Unterschieidung von Freund und Feind). This distinction would be presupposed by ‘pessimistic’ theoreticians of the political, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and even Fichte (p. 64; p. 65). We shall see below what makes these pessimistic theoreticians, in Schmitt’s eyes, the only authentic thinkers of the political.
10. See The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1985; and Théologie politique, trans, and presented J.-L. Schlegel, Gallimard, 1988, p. VII [English translation, Political Theology, by George Schwab, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London 1985],
11. pp. 29–30; pp. 28–9.
12. We shall attempt to do so elsewhere, especially around several examples from the Old Testament which, to us, appear difficult to incorporate into Schmittian logic.
13. p. 29, n. 5; tr.p 28, n. 9. On the theme of stásis, as on so many related themes, we already refer here, and shall do so again, to the original and indispensable works of Nicole Loraux. For the moment, let us simply note this sensitive place where Loraux points out the suspension of the opposition stásis/pólemos. When citizens are ‘killed by other Athenians’ while they were coming to the rescue of democracy against oligarchy, ‘their death actually transgresses the opposition of stásis and pólemos, the norm of all organized political life, thereby creating an exceptional situation’ (The Invention of Athens, p. 201].
Long after The Concept of the Political (1932), in 1969, Schmitt went back to this notion of stásis, and devoted several truly pregnant pages to it. Their starting point is Gregory of Nazianzus’s argument according to which any stásis in the Trinity would be unthinkable, whereas ‘the One – to hen – is always in revolt – stasiázon – against itself – prós heautón’. Schmitt thus notes that the word stásis, meaning revolt, appears ‘at the heart of the most irreproachable formulation of the thorny dogma’. He recalls not only Plato (Sophist, 249–54), and the passage from the Republic that we are dealing with here, but also the Greek Church Fathers, neo-Platonism and Plotinus. He goes on
Stasis means in the first place repose, state of rest, position, arrest (status), the opposite notion is kinesis movement But secondly, stasis also means (political) unrest, movement, revolt and civil war. Most Greek lexicons juxtapose with no further ado the two opposed meanings, without attempting to explain them, something which, moreover, could never be legitimately demanded of them. However, even the simple juxtaposition of numerous examples of such an opposition is a gold mine for the knowledge of political and theologico-political phenomena In this case, a veritable theologico-political stasiology emerges from the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity The problem of enmity and of the enemy could never be eclipsed. In the linguistic usage of the modern world, a significant fact has been recently added in the Anglo-American linguistic zone’ the word foe, judged outdated and of only ‘rhetorical’ value since Shakespeare, has a new lease of life since the Second World War (Théologie politique, 1922, 1969, pp. 127, 173–5).
On the modern rehabilitation of the word foe, see also the end of the preface to the French reissue of Le Concept du politique (1963). On the difficulties in maintaining these distinctions in the etymology of the German Feind, see the unwieldy development in Corollaire II (3), 1938. We shall return to this later, in the next chapter, around the figure of the brother.
Schmitt’s usage of status here should be set beside that which he emphasizes elsewhere, on the first page of The Concept of the Political: the State is Status, status par excellence, sheer status (der Status schlechthin). As for the stasiology evoked therein (which would be working either at the heart of the One, or in the centre of a Trinity or Holy Family), this is a motif which – in different words, in another style and in view of other consequences – could very well describe one of the subterranean but utterly continuous themes of this essay: how the One divides and opposes itself, opposes itself by posing itself, represses and violates the difference it carries within itself, wages war, wages war on itself, itself becoming war [se fait la guerre], frightens itself, itself becoming fear [se fait peur], and does violence to itself, itself becoming violence [se fait violence], transforms itself into frightened violence in guarding itself from the other, for it guards itself from, and in, the other [il se garde de l’autre], always, Him, the One, the One ‘different from itself’.
14. Schmitt adds a specification that he judges analogous to the opposition between hostis (public enemy) and inimicus (private enemy); this does not mean – let us note the dissymmetry of which Schmitt does not seem to take account – that ekhthrós, who can be the enemy in a ‘civil war’ (stásis), is a ‘private’ enemy: can one not have ‘private’ (therefore political) enemies in a civil war (stásis)? As for the Latin, Schmitt’s reference is as follows: ‘Hostis is est cum quo publice bellum habemus … in quo ab inimico differt, qui est is, quocum habemus privata odia. Distingui etiam sic possunt, ut inimicus sit qui nos odit; hostis qui oppugnat’ (Forcellini, Lexicon totius Latinitatis, III, 320, 511), pp. 29, 196.
15. ‘… absolute evil’, writes Nicole Loraux, but also ‘a parasitical evil grafted on to the proper nature of the city’ (The Invention of Athens, pp. 198, 199).
16. Ibid.., pp. 175, 189, 310, 312–13.
17. Menexenus, 244ab [in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton University Press 1961, p. 194].
18. Ibid., 239a.
19. Ibid., 326e, 237b.
20. This passage from Menexenus is also evoked by Nicole Loraux, in particular in Les Enfants d’Athéna. Idées athéniennes sur la citoyenneté et la division des sexes, Maspero, 1981, p. 41 [The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division Between the Sexes, trans. Cardine Levine, foreword Froma I. Zeitlin, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1993], precisely in one of her priceless chapters on ‘Autochthony, an Athenian Topic’, and ‘the required theme of the epitáphioi’ (p. 41) and in a footnote to her Les Mères en deuil [Mothers in Mourning], Le Seuil 1990, p. 128, n.29 On most of these questions, I naturally refer back – and, as is meet and fitting, with much gratitude – to all the works of Nicole Loraux, to those just mentioned and to Façons tragiques de tuer une femme, Hachette 1985 [Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1987].
To my knowledge this has never been done, but it would undoubtedly be interesting to compare the two lines of research – so different in so many respects – of Nicole Loraux and Paul de Man on the laws, genre, poetics and rhetoric, and also the paradoxes, of the epitaph. See in particular Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ (around Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs) in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York 1984. See also ‘Mnemosyne’, in Mémoires – for Paul de Man, in which I also followed through this motif of the discourse of mourning, the funeral oration and the epitaph (Galilée, 1988), especially pp. 43 ff. [trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava and Peggy Kamuf, Columbia University Press, New York 1986, 1989, pp. 21 ff.].
21. Le Vocabulaire des institutions européennes. Minuit, 1969, vol. 1, pp. 220 ff. [Indo-European Language and Society, trans, by Elizabeth Palmer, London: Faber & Faber 1973].
22. Ibid., trans., p. 179.
23. Ibid., pp. 335 ff., pp. 352–3; trans, p. 288.
24. See Loraux, The Invention of Athens, pp. 312–13.
25. As we have indicated from the epigraph on, and then repeatedly, the argument of this chapter intersects in its own way, in paying homage to it, the reflection that Nicole Loraux entitles, in The Invention of Athens, ‘For the name … It is Called Democracy’. The particular orientation of this essay on friendship, in discussing the name of democracy and the deconstruction of a certain concept of democracy in the name of democracy, could take the following form today, still today and perhaps more than ever: how do you deconstruct the essential link of a certain concept of democracy to autochthony and to eugenics without, for all that, giving up the name of democracy? Nor its historicity? But how do you think this historicity to which no history has ever been able to measure up? Such a question would resemble at least that of the ‘immemorial’ or the relations between ‘myth’ and ‘history’ as it is formulated, for example, in these following lines by Nicole Loraux:
It is not only in the temporal unfolding of the text that demokratla, annexed to autochthony and flanked by noble exploits, is linked to eugéneia, but also, in absolute terms, the time of the myth is for the orator the moment of democracy. In other words, it has no origin, it is immemorial, ‘they were thus the first and only ones of that tune who abolished kingdoms among themselves and established democracy’ (Lysias, 18), en ekelnōi tôi khrónōi referring either to the first birth of the autochthons, that is, to the origin of mankind, or, beyond the passage on autochthony, to the period of the great mythical exploits So there is, to say the least, a tension between myth and history in this passage, (p. 194)
‘Either … or’: I have underlined these words. A question, then: is it possible, will it ever be possible, for us to keep the name democracy beyond this alternative, in excluding it both from history as the history of autochthony or eugenics and from myth? In order to confide it to or open it to another memory, another immemoriality, another history, another future?
1. Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse, 1937, GW, Bd XVI [trans., Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Standard Edition 23, p. 246].
2. CP, p. 63; p. 63 [The English translation has omitted the quotation marks.]
3. For example, ibid., p. 64; p. 65.
4. Ibid. [Translation modified.]
5. Ibid., p. 64; p. 65.
6. 472e.
7. See above, pp. 90–91. This would suffice to justify circumspection in having recourse to this opposition, and especially to the single word stásis. But there is more. Recalling that ‘Plato shares with all his contemporaries’ the ‘logic’ of the opposition of complementarity between pólemos and stásis, Nicole Loraux adds, by way of drawing interesting consequences, the following point: ‘But the insistence on emphasizing that, in the case of civil war, stásis is a name is especially Platonic. Only a name: a simple appellation, indeed, as a passage from Laws suggests, an inaccurate appellation. Defining “the worst scourge for a city”, the Athenian-nomothete is at great pains to contest the pertinence of the standard appellation of civil war, “whose right name would indeed be rather diastasis than stásis.”’ ‘Cratyle à l’épreuve de Stásis’, in Revue de philosophie ancienne, no. 1, 1987, pp. 56–7.
8. 473a.
9. For Benjamin, spectral (gespenstische) is the force of law in the figure of the police, such that it can assure politics and protect the State in ‘the life of civilized States’. We have analysed the implications of this passage of Benjamin’s ‘For a critique of violence’ in Force de loi (Galilée 1994) [‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” ’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson, Routledge, New York and London 1992].
10. Whether by polemical strategy or not, whether or not he was sincere (that is the whole question), Schmitt did not fail, here or there, to present such and such of his incriminated political discourses as acts of knowledge, as the neutral diagnostics of an analysis, not as Nazi or anti-Semitic interventions or position-takings This was the case, in exemplary fashion, in the course of his interrogation by Professor Robert Kempner, a German immigrant and American prosecutor at Nuremberg after the war. Asked if he had intended to contribute to the ‘institution’ of a new international order of right in conformity with the ideas of Hitler, Schmitt answered that he did not do this in conformity with Hitler’s ideas, and that he was not searching to institute [instituer], only to diagnose. This did not prevent him from presenting himself elsewhere as an adventurer of intelligence who had always assumed the risks of his actions and never sought to avoid paying their price. The same ruse – the same answer, in any case – before a sentence refusing ‘Jewish authors’ responsibility not only in the development of the theory of space (Raum) but in ‘the creation of anything at all’. ‘Do you deny’, Kempner then inquires, ‘that this passage is in the purest Goebbels style?’ Schmitt denies it, of course, in its form and content. He requests that the ‘serious scientific context’ of the passage be taken into consideration: ‘in its intent, method, and formulation, it is a pure diagnosis.… Everything I stated, in particular in this passage, was intended as scholarship, as a scholarly thesis I would defend before any scholarly body in the world’ (pp. 98–100 of the English translation of this interrogation, presented by Joseph W. Bendersky: ‘Schmitt at Nuremberg’, in Telos, New York, special issue, ‘Carl Schmitt: Enemy or Foe?’ no. 72, Summer 1987).
11. CP, pp. 30–32; ibid.
12. See above, pp. 108–9, n. 13.
13. CP, p. 25, p. 24.
14. Ibid., p. 32; p. 32.
15. A long note gives numerous historical details on this point: pp. 44–7 (the English translation has excised them). For example, this phrase of the Comité de salut public (10 October 1793), quoted in E. Friesenhahn, Le Serment politique (The Political Oath): ‘Since the day the French people manifested its will, everything opposed to it is outside the sovereign; everything outside the sovereign is an enemy.… Between the people and its enemies there is nothing left in common but the sword.’
16. CP, p. 33; p. 32 [translation modified].
17. An attentive reading of ‘Thoughts for the Times…’ in this context would undoubtedly be necessary. To my knowledge, Schmitt never showed much interest (no more than Heidegger in any case, and this fact is by no means without import) in someone he could have classed, according to his own criteria, among the authentic thinkers of the political – that is, those beginning with a pessimistic vision of mankind. Man is not originarily good – according to Schmitt, this is the fundamental thesis of a theory of the political. It is also the resigned thesis of ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, which, in addition, on the subject of the essential violence of the State, piles up statements of a Schmittian or Benjaminian sort. Freud indeed insists on the fact that if the State forbids the individual from having recourse to injustice, it is not in order to suppress injustice but to maintain a monopoly on it. Concerning the ‘optimistic’ answer to the question of man (‘man is born noble and good’), Freud declares it ‘of no value’: ‘we do not have to concern ourselves with it here’. The interdict ‘thou shalt not kill’ confirms that we descend from a generation of murderers. Not to speak of the law of ambivalence inscribing hatred in the very mourning of our friends, and of a love which is as old as the drive to murder. The epitaph and the funeral oration are a theme of Chapter 2. To this fundamental violence, Freud never proposes (nor does Schmitt, for that matter) anything but compensations in the name of a life which, however, does not know death, and does not have to deal with it as such (we shall clarify this paradoxical point concerning Schmitt). The si vis vitam, para mortem that Freud proposes as a substitute for the si vis pacem para bellum at the end of ‘Thoughts for the Times’ only confirms this fundamental political pessimism. That could be verified on every page of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and is illustrated by the Schopenhauerian fable that Freud enjoys quoting in this context: some porcupines give up cuddling each other to ward off the cold: their quills hurt them. Obliged one cold winter day to huddle together, they end up, finding a mean distance between attraction and repulsion.
18. Proximity to Heidegger. Does the being-for-death of Dasein include, in the structure of its essence, war and combat (Kampf) or not? We have taken up this point in ‘L’oreille de Heidegger’ [‘Heidegger’s Ear, Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV),’ in John Sallis (ed.) Reading Heidegger, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991]. Among the many themes of the chiasmus through which the Heideggerian and Schmittian discourse intersect in a distancing and an opposition, there is not only the theme of technics (which, according to both thinkers, seems only to depoliticize or neutralize – and this only within certain limits, limits we are approaching in this century which we, however, believe to be delivered over to technics), there is also the theme of death. But here divergence prevails. This may seem paradoxical, but the real possibility of putting-to-death (execution), which is an irreducible condition of the political, and indeed the ontological structure of human existence, means for Schmitt neither an ontology of death or of dying nor a serious consideration of a nothingness (néant) or of a Niditigkeit; nor, in another code, the position of a death principle or instinct. Execution indeed proceeds from an oppositional negativity, but one which belongs to life through and through, in so far as life opposes itself in affirming itself. Not to life against death, but to life against life, to spirit against spirit, as The Concept of the Political concludes, here again, in Hegelian and anti-Hegelian expressions (Hegel would not have affirmed as easily as Schmitt that spirit, or life as the life of the spirit, does not confront death itself). This affirmation of life (in the war of life against life) culminates precisely in a condemnation of modern technologism which would strive to neutralize the political (and the politicity of technics) by relying on the antithesis mechanical/organic qua the antithesis the dead/the living: ‘A life confronted with nothing more than death is no longer life; it is pure impotence and distress.’ Life can only love life, even when it is opposed to itself. One should therefore (Schmitt does not say so) ‘love’ one’s enemy, at least in so far as he is living. To be put to death, the enemy must precisely be a living being. ‘The person knowing no other enemy than death, and who sees in this enemy but an unhinged mechanism, is closer to death than to life, and the facile antithesis that opposes the organic to the mechanical stems itself from a primitive mechanism (etwas Roh-Mechanisches)’ (p. 95). We shall come across the logic of this evaluation of the ‘technicized earth’ and economic planning once again, in Ex Captivitate Salus (Greven Verlag, Cologne 1950), with a pathos more marked by history, and a stress that is not so far from that of Heidegger.
19. But what would a purely collective or communal affect be without the least individual or ‘private’ dimension, a purely public affect? Yet it is essential to Schmitt to have this undiscoverable limit. He is hopelessly seeking the signs of such an affect everywhere – linguistic clues, testimonies that would at least come to mark the desire or the need of this impossible distinction. This is why he would undoubtedly judge our indistinct usage illegitimate and lacking in rigour (but who does not use them in this way? And why, fundamentally, are they thus used? What is the shared root, the analogy, of such use?) of words such as philía, ‘friendship’, ‘love’, ‘enmity’, ‘hostility’, and so forth, as long as we do not specify if it is a matter of feeling or not, of a universal or political feeling (that is, from one community to the other), of private or public feeling, one being heterogeneous to the other. Phileîn or amare, for example, would not mean ‘to love’ in the Christian sense of love of one’s neighbour. A footnote to the 1963 edition of The Concept of the Political (p. 118) recalls that in the New Testament, enemy in Latin is inimicus, not hostis; to love is diligere, not amare; in Greek, agapán, not phileîa. The concept of hatred, as a feeling, would have not juridical or political meaning, and the concept of enemy (juridical or political: hostis) in no way implies hatred. Alvaro d’Ars: ‘hate is no term of law’ [in English]. Spinoza, in the Theological-Political Treatise: ‘hostem enim imperii non odium sed jus fecit’ (ch. XVI).
20. CP, p. 33; p. 33. Derrick’s emphasis [translation modified].
21. CP, p. 67; p. 68.
22. CP, pp. 34–5; p. 34. [The English translation has been modified (including, above all, the restitution of the stress on ‘presupposition’, absent in translation) to follow Derrida’s modifications of the French translation of the German original.]
23. CP, p. 35; pp. 34–5.
24. CP, p. 35; p. 35.
25. We are evidently thinking here of another delimitation and of another beyond-the-political in its traditional form, of another ‘withdrawal of the political’. I refer the reader to the rewarding volume with this tide (Le Retrait du politique, Galilée 1983) which, after Rejouer le politique (Galilée 1981), brought together remarkable papers given at the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political at the Ecole normale supérieure, under the direction of Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.L. Nancy. If my memory serves me well, there is no mention of Schmitt, nor of his concept of depoliticization, in these papers. My work here would be, as a sign of gratitude, a modest and belated contribution to work that was important for my own.
26. CP, p. 35.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., pp. 36–7.
1. ‘Nach deutschem Spradisinn (wie in vielen anderen Sprachen) ist “Freund” ursprünglidi nur der Sippengnosse. Freund ist also ursprünglich nur der Blutsfreund, der Blutsverwandte, oder der durch Heirat, Schwurbrūderschaft, Annahme an Kindes Statt oder durch entsprechende Einrichtungen “verwandt Gemachte”’ (The Concept of the Political, Corollary II, p. 104 of the German edition).
2. ‘Umeis ára eí philoei eston allélois, phúsei pē oikeioi esth’umin autois’ (Lysis, 221e).
3. CP, p. 29.
4. Ibid., pp. 74–5.
5. Ibid., pp. 62–3. [Hegel’s definition of the enemy, which Schwab has not included in his translation of this section of CP, is from the System of Ethical Life, trans. H.S. Harris and T.M. Knox, Albany, State University of New York Press 1979, p. 147.]
6. Ibid., p. 63 (Derrida’s emphasis).
7. Theorie des Partisanen, Zwischienbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1963. p. 25 [henceforth abbreviated TP. Page references are to the German edition, and all English translations of this work are my own – Trans.]
8. TP, pp. 25–6.
9. (‘Tellurischer fundiert als die Lenins.’) Ibid., p. 61.
10. Ibid., pp. 29, 41.
11. (‘die dünne Brücke über einem Abgrund.’) Ibid., p. 37.
12. ‘aus ihrem Bewusstsein verdrängt.’ Ibid., p. 41.
13. TP, p. 46.
14. Ibid.
15. ‘Begriffsauflösung’. Ibid., p. 25.
16. ‘eine umstürzende Wendung.’ Ibid., p. 53.
17. TP, p. 49.
18. Ibid., p. 52. Thanks to the spectral ‘evocation’ (Beschwörung) of the partisan.
19. Ibid., p. 56.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p. 57.
22. Ibid., p. 65.
23. (‘Bruderkampf.’) Ibid., p. 59.
24. (‘gegen den eigenen, nationalen Bruder.’) Ibid., p. 63.
25. On this question, that of surrogate mothers – in sum, well before the surrogate mother – on its ‘classical and modern’ stakes, on the ineradicable phantasm of an identifiable mother on the basis of the testimony of the perceptible (the identity of the father, a ‘legal fiction’ as it is called in Joyce’s Ulysses, remaining inferred in a judgement), on the phallogocentric blindness of Freud, among others, who sees, in the Rat Man, patriarchy as the condition of progress in human reason and culture, I would like to refer the reader to my essay: Le concept d’archive, une impression freudienne, Galilée 1996.
26. The tradition that Schmitt refers to, that of the oath of fraternity or the sworn brother, is no doubt not foreign to the rich strands of the tradition found in the Icelandic sagas. ‘Föstbrodir’ means foster brother or sworn brother. The Saga of the Sworn Brother and that of Gisli Súrsson describe a friendship formed in rituals and sacred liturgies. The concept of sworn brother has wide application. It also determines adoptive fraternity between so-called natural or legitimate brothers and brothers welcomed into the same family, following the usage of fóstri (no doubt of Celtic origin), often intended to increase clan power or to save an inheritance. See La Saga des frères jurés or La Saga de Gisli Súrsson, in Sagas islandaises, texts translated, introduced and annotated by Régis Boyer, Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1987.
27. On this point see De l’esprit, Heidegger et la question, Galilée 1987, pp. 147 ff. [Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1989, pp. 129–36.]
28. CP, pp. 14–15. [The preface to the 1963 edition of CP has not been translated. I have done so from the French – Trans.]
29. Lysis, 220ce.
30. Ibid., 222a.
31. I hope I have not stretched too far the limits of the semantic field generally ascribed to oikeiótēs. I refer the reader here, as I should do more often, to Jean-Claude Fraisse’s fine study, Philía, La notion d’amitié dans la philsophie antique (Vrin 1984). In the chapter devoted to an analysis of Lysis, to its place in the Platonic corpus and to the idea of oikeiitēs, the analysis provides an enlightening definition, but one which I would like to expand slightly, while suspending the values of ‘personality’ and ‘interiority’, which are perhaps difficult to fit into this Greek context. The definition is as follows: ‘in a lather rich ambiguity, the adjective oikeios connotes, in Plato as in common language, that which is one’s own, personal, even intimate and interior, as well as that which is close, from the parent or the friend to the compatriot. It thus takes on all the original signification of the term phílas, while undoubtedly stressing more than that word the relation to personality and to interiority. Plato will play on this ambiguity to designate the good as our oikeion, to the extent to which it is always simultaneously exterior and intimately present for us.…’ And a quotation from the Symposium (205e) confirms this result, yet introduces – Fraisse makes no note of it – a distinction, perhaps a veritable disjunction generating desire, between what belongs, as one’s own, and the good, designated as oikeion: ‘Love longs for neither the half nor the whole of anything except the good.… Indeed, I think we prize our own belongings only in so far as we say that the good [is our own] (oikeion), belongs to us, and the bad belongs to someone else (allotrion)’ (pp. 143–4).
Is it not this last difference, as important as that which disjoins the what is one’s own and distinguishes it from the homogeneous (oikeion/homoion), a difference stressed in the last page of Lysis?
32. Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel, Stuttgart, Klett Verlage 1985. We will attempt elsewhere to take up this essay in its own right. It conducts a dialogue in passing with Benjamin (Schmitt recalls Benjamin’s debt to his own definition of the sovereign decision, which the latter acknowledged in a letter of 1930). Beyond ancient tragedy and the Atreides, through the themes of vengeance, of the brother and of election, this essay also questions the political destiny of the ‘European spirit’. If the latter has been ‘demythologized’ since the Renaissance, how is it that Hamlet (or the process of a ‘Hamletization of the avenger’) has become a myth? Among the three major works of European literature, among the three symbolic figures that have marked a reversal – indeed, a deranging and derailing of the spirit, a madness of the spirit that becomes out of joint or is derailed (‘Alle drei sind vom Geist aus der Bahn geworfen’): Don Quixote, ‘Spanish and purely Catholic’; Faust, ‘German and Protestant’; finally Hamlet, occupying the middle position between the two (the German and the Spaniard, let us remember, the two Resistance fighters, the two inventors of the war of partisans against the State, the Napoleonic army and its ‘humanitarian ideology’), Hamlet would connote this between-the-two, the fission or the division of this milieu, this Spaltung which has ‘determined the destiny of Europe’ (Hamlet steht zwischen beiden mitten in der Spaltung, die das Schicksal Europas bestimmt hat’, p. 54).
But – a well-known theme (see Heidegger) – this between-the-two as a rending is also a name for Germany. Recalling that in Hamlet has been recognized the figure of ‘the German people’, a people ‘torn and divided within itself, Schmitt quotes several times from the poem ‘Hamlet’, written shortly before the liberal revolution of 1848 by Ferdinand Freiligrath. The poem begins: ‘Deutschland ist Hamlet!’.
33. Since he calls upon the Republic when he needs to explain his concept of pólemos, Schmitt might have remembered that Plato, in precisely these same passages, has a word to say for women in war. He tries his best, a little, in his own way, to do right by them, whether they fight on the front or remain behind to frighten the enemy. Having noted that the warriors would be all the more successful in war for knowing each other ‘by the names of brothers, fathers, sons’, Plato adds: ‘And if the females should also join in their campaigns, whether in the ranks or marshalled behind to intimidate the enemy, or as reserves in case of need, I recognize’ that all this would make them irresistible.’ Republic, V, 471d.
34. ‘Weimsheit der Zelle’, in Ex Captivitate Salus, Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945/47, pp. 80–87.
35. ‘According to a remark by a commentator in the immediate post-war period, Schmitt “could be neither nazified nor denazified” (‘Der Fall Carl Schmitt: Charaktermord’, Der Fortschritt, 4, 25 January, 1952’, J.-W. Bendersky, ‘Carl Schmitt at Nuremberg’, Telos 72, Summer 1987, p. 96.
36. This is the central and organizing affirmation of his Political Theology, 1922, 1969. As for these problems, particularly the way they are posed in Schmitt, I refer the reader to a remarkable article by Jean-François Courtine, ‘A propos du “problème théologjco-politique” ’, in Droits, Revue française de théorie juridique, 18, 1993, pp. 109–18.
37. ‘Und wer kann mich wirklich in Frage stellen? Nur ich mich selbst. Oder mein Bruder. Das ist es. Der Andere ist mein Bruder. Der Andere erweist sich als mein Bruder, und der Bruder erweist sich als mein Feind’, Ex Captivitate Salus, p. 89.
38. On this theme (‘All men are brothers’ or ‘All human beings are siblings’) see Marc Shell’s rich and recent Children of the Earth, Literature, Politics and Nationhood, Oxford 1993.
39. Heraclitus, fragment 53. We shall take up the Heideggerian reading of this fragment later. We shall mention a letter that Heidegger, still rector, sent in August 1933 to Schmitt, who had just sent him the second edition of The Concept of the Political and had no doubt, in the dedication or in an accompanying letter, quoted this fragment of Heraclitus.
40. Sang an Palenno. In August 1946, Schmitt dedicated a text to ‘two Berlin graves’, Kleist’s and Däubler’s. This and the following verse (‘Und er wird uns, wir ihn zum selben Ende hetzen’) form the epigraph of a recently published book on which I regret that I am not able to comment: Heinrich Meier, Die Lehre Carl Schmitts, Metzler, Stuttgart/Weimar 1994.
41. On Antigone, Hegel, and Greek, Jewish, or Christian families, on the speculative thought of the Holy Family, I refer the reader to Glas [trans. John P. Leavey, Jr and Richard Rand, University of Nebraska Press 1986 (1974)].
1. ‘For it is love, the thing that gives us our word for friendship…’; ‘from this a flame bursts forth, whether of love or of friendship’, Laelius de Amicitia, VIII, 26; XXVII, 100.
2. Slaves by Choice, [trans. Malcolm Smith, Egham: Runnymede Books, 1988], p. 48.
4. We are quoting – as we often do, but here without modifications – M.L. Steinhauser’s translation of Schmitt’s preface [hitherto untranslated in English], in La notion du politique, Théorie du partisan, Flammarion, ‘Champs’, p. 41. It is not without interest that Schmitt cites, in the original German (1542), the chronicle (Cillierchronik) of a noble Slovene family. Schmitt quotes from a book by Otto Brunner published in 1939: ‘Aristoteles spridit, das etlich weis sprechen und rnainen, und spricht es mitsambt in, das freundtschaft und krieg ursach sindt der Stiftung und Störung.’
5. ‘Mía psukhē dúo sṓmasin enoikousa.’ In the Eudemian Ethics (VII, 1240b 2–15) there are formulas whose letter is the closest to this reported statement. But here, already, Aristotle reports something said, not without manifesting a certain reserve: ‘Further, we say about friendship such things as that friendship is equality (os isites philótēs), and true friends have but a single soul (mían psukhen). All such phrases point back to the single individual; for a man wishes good to himself in this fashion.… And wishing the existence above all of the friend, living with him, sharing his joy and his grief unity of soul with the friend, the impossibility of even living without one another, and the dying together are characteristic of a single individual. (For such is the condition of the individual and he perhaps takes pleasure in his own company (ísōs omilei autyos autô.) … And for this reason it seems possible for a man to be at enmity with himself, but so far as he is single and indivisible, he is an object of desire to himself. Such is the good man, the man whose friendship is based on excellence, for the wicked man is not one but many…’ (emphasis added.)
6. From the beginning of the essay ‘On Friendship’, Montaigne evokes the authority of the ‘Ancient schools’ to justify not only the inadequation of the marriage model to the model of perfect friendship but the incapacity of the female sex even to approach it. And it is certainly not insignificant for what is of import to us at this exact point, that the justification is couched in the logic of the gift, the market or commerce. Marriage is a free market (‘a market to which only the entrance is free’ – which is counted as a liability – free, that is, contractual and reversible by definition), and a market above all, not having its signification, its end and its form in itself. It is a market without immanence, without autonomy and without the disinterestedness that fit friendship: while the ‘market’ of marriage is normally made ‘for other purposes’, ‘in friendship there is no traffic or commerce except with itself. In this, friendship is freer than the ‘market’ whose ‘entrance is free’ (‘Our “willing freedom” produces nothing more properly its own than affection and loving friendship’: p. 208). Furthermore, the fault lies less with marriage than in woman, in her sex:
In addition, women are in truth not normally capable of responding to such familiarity and mutual confidence as sustain that holy bond [saincte couture]* of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn. And indeed if it were not for that, if it were possible to fashion such a relationship, willing and free, in which not only the soul had this full enjoyment but in which the bodies too shared in the union – where the whole human being was involved – it is certain that the loving-friendship would be more full and more abundant. But there is no example yet of woman attaining to it, and by the common agreement of the Ancient schools of philosophy she is excluded from it. (p. 210)
When he sends La Boétie’s sonnets to Madame de Grammont, Montaigne is intent on warning her about certain verses, those that ‘were written in favour of his future wife in that time when he was preparing his marriage, and which already smack of God knows what marital coldness’.
7. p. 208. Here again the Ciceronian theme, always working through presence and proximity (propinquitas). The law is that which is close. Although Cicero maintains that social bonds grow stronger to the extent that men are close to one another (ut quisque proxime accedere), that men naturally prefer their fellow citizens to foreigners (peregrini), their relatives to others (propinqui quam alieni), if he is intent on recalling that it is ‘nature’ itself that ‘brings about’ a friendship between relatives, Cicero specifies that this familial friendship can come to lack a sufficiently firm and stable base (firmitatis). Friendship is not always sufficiently durable and steadfast – ‘bébaios’, as it would have been expressed in the Greek tradition. Hence the advantage of friendship over a propinquitas (the proximity of the close and familial alliance), which may sometimes lose this good feeling, this favourable disposition (benevolentia), this wanting-the-good which is never absent from friendship. This benevolentia associated by Cicero with caritas is the best gift of the gods but, in general, unites ‘no more than a handful of individuals’ (V, 19, 20). We are slowly approaching that arithmetic concealed in the enigma of ‘O my friends…’.
The conclusion of De Amicitia firmly ties the bond of friendship to virtue as that which correctly assures the firm basis of the bond. That which in friendship is ‘bébaios’, following this Greek lead, is what binds it to virtue. And it is recalled precisely through an address to friends: ‘Virtus, virtus inquam, I tell you – you, Gaius Fannius and you, Quin tus Mucius: it is virtue, yes, virtue, that initiates and preserves friendship. For virtue assures harmony (convenentia rerum), stability, earnestness.’ The whole passage is dominated by a metaphorics of glint, light, and fire. The glint of virtue is reflected from one to the other, and the reflection creates participation. The light becomes fire, and ‘from this [reflection] a flame breaks forth, whether of love or of friendship (ex quo exardescit sive amor sive amicitia). Both terms, after all, are derived from the verb “to love” (Utrumque enim ductum est ab amando).’ After this Cicero distinguishes love from friendship: if to love, the act of loving, in both friendship and love, is always disinterested, advantage in fact does grow out of friendship, even if it is not sought (XXVII, 100).
8. This is yet another Ciceronian topos, a quasi-quotation from Laelius de Amicitia (‘I have been bereaved of a friend such as the world will never see again – at least, so it seems to me. One thing I am sure of is there was never such a one before.… How beloved he was of his fellow citizens was made clear by the mourning at his funeral.… For I cannot agree with those who in the last few years have begun to … say that the soul dies with the body and that death is the end of all things. I am more inclined to accept the point of view expressed by men of earlier days – by our own ancestors, for example, who so scrupulously observed the honours due to the dead’; and after a eulogy of Greater Greece and its institutions, after recalling shared political and personal cares, the hope that ‘for all time to come men will remember my friendship with Scipio’: ‘in all the course of history men can name scarcely three or four pairs of friends (paria amicorum)’ (11–15). To the couple Laelius and Scipio must be added the other masculine couples cited here or elsewhere by Cicero: Orestes and Pylades, Theseus and Pirithoüs, Damon and Phthias.
9. Cited in the entry ‘Fraternity’ in the Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution française by François Furet and M. Ozouf, Paris: Flammarion 1988, ch. IV. Reissued in the collection ‘Champs’ 1992, p. 210.
10. p. 207. Jean-Claude Fraisse provides an excellent clarification of this point of Aristotelian discourse. On the subject of ‘ideas of reciprocity and equality’ guiding justice, Fraisse points out, in effect: ‘This is all identical to what friendship realizes. Yet the paths are not the same: while bringing about friendship among citizens seems to be the lawgiver’s ideal,* the existence of frienship makes the existence of justice and legislation useless.† While justice proceeds by constraint … friendship … is linked to virtue alone.… Thus do we see Aristotle being careful to avoid the slightest corruption of friendship by law.’
11. Emphasis added. In the wily reasoning of this page, which we are unable to follow here as meticulously as we should, the parenthesis seems to imply that if Montaigne gives his approval to unconditional obedience in certain cases, it must remain informed by reason and by virtue, without which there is no perfect friendship. Virtue and reason are not empirical conditions but appertain to the structure of sovereign and unconditional friendship. In the same move, the unconditionally cannot be blind. Faithful obedience is trusting, and trust is enlightened a priori by reason as well as by virtue which, in each of the two friends, were, from the beginning, indissociable from what binds their two wills together in the same ‘harness’. As a consequence, the position taken by Montaigne appears less opposed to Cicero’s than it would at first seem. Concerning the same example – Montaigne has then borrowed it from him once again – Cicero manifests an unequivocal hostility towards Caius Blosius:
Wrongdoing, then, is not excused if it is committed for the sake of a friend; after all, the thing that brings friends together is their conviction of each other’s virtue; it is hard to keep up a friendship if one has deserted virtue’s camp Let us, then, lay down this law for friendship: we must not ask wrongful things, nor do them, if we are asked to. For if a man should declare that he has done a thing of this kind for a friend’s sake, the excuse does him no honour and is absolutely unacceptable even in ordinary affairs, and especially so if the act was treasonable (contra rem publicam) (Laelius de Amicitia, XI, XII).
12. Ibid., V, 18.
13. Ibid., VIII, 26.
14. The Confessions [trans. P.S. Pine-Coffin, Penguin Books, 1961], pp. 77, 78–80.
15. Retractations, II, VI, 2 [as quoted by the editors of the French edition of the Confessions – my translation – Trans.]
16. Confessions, IV IX, 14, p. 79. [Pine-Coffin’s translation is too telegraphic at this point: ‘… if we do not return love for love’ gives short shrift to Augustine’s Latin, which Derrida has respected more closely: ‘if he does not love his beloved, redoubled in love (si non amaverit redamentem) or if he is not redoubled in love for his beloved (aut si amantem non redamaverif)’ – Trans.]
17. Confessions, IV, X, 15, p. 80.
18. ‘Beatus qui amat te et amicum in te et inimicum propter te’: ibid., IV, IX, 14, p. 79.
1. Thus there is, to my knowledge, unanimity among the ‘canonical’ citations, the most famous or the most popular among them, even if the situation is more complex for the existing translations in use. Clues will have to suffice for our argument, since one translation has prevailed, not the other. This certainly does not justify the failing? of the investigation. I have not checked all the existing translations in the world. The version I am calling the canonical one also justifies itself through recourse to existing translations. Here are a few:
In French: ‘O mes amis, il n’y a pas d’ami (véritable)’. Diogène Laērce, Vie, Doctrines et Sentences des phílosophes illustres, traductions, notice et notes par R. Genaielle, Garnier–Flammarion, 1965, t. 1, p. 236.
In German: ‘O Freunde, nirgends ein Freund!’ Des Diogenes Laertius Philosophische Geschichte Oder Von dem Leben, den Meinungen und merkwürdigen Reden der Berühmtesten Philosophen Griechenlands aus dem Griechischen das erstemal ins Deutsche übersetzt, Leipzig, im Schwickertschen Verlage, 1806.
In Spanish: ‘Oh amigos! no hay ningún amigo’, Diogenes Learcio, Vidas de los más ilustres filósofos griegos, Orbis, Barcelone, 1985, Traducción del griego, prólogo y notas, José Ortiz y Sainz, vol. 1, p. 189.
Unlike the translations we will soon be quoting, which construct the sentence differently, these three translations share the fact that they do not give the Greek text on the facing page. One therefore cannot know how, in the view of the translator, the ōmēga is to be accentuated.
2. Eudemian Ethics, 1240b 5–10.
3. Laelius de Amicitia, XXI, 80 (‘for the true friend is, so to speak, a second self). We shall meet this topos again between Michelet and Quinet.
4. ‘Ou ton tripón, eîpein, alla ton ánthropon ēléēsa’, V, 17, 4–5.
5. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, V, 21, 3–4: ‘ou tô anihrípō, phēsín, édōka, alla tô anthrōpíno’.
6. Nicomachean Ethics, 1159b 25–30.
7. 1235b 12: ‘Kai tas aporías lúsei kai tas enantiíseis’.
8. I take the liberty of referring the reader to Glas, pp. 133–4 and passim.
9. Tô árkhonti phúsei kai theô pros to arkhómenon’, 1242b 20.
10. Here again I must remind the reader that this is not an exhaustive investigation. These factual limits will never be justifiable, but my aim has been in the first place to set up the bearings for the possibility and stakes of an alternative reading – this is what I am doing here; I am not dealing with the worldwide philological state of the question. Here I should thank the men and women friends who have helped me along these international paths, through the several languages, libraries or bibliographies to which I refer, be they Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, or German: Giorgio Agamben, Maurizio Ferraris, Cristina de Peretti, Aileen Philips, Elisabeth Weber.
11. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, with an English translation by R.D. Hicks, vol. 1. The Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London 1925–91, pp. 464–5.
12. Diogene Laerzio, Vite dei filosofi, c. di Marcello Gigante, ed. Laterza, Roma-Bari 1962, p. 204.
13. Diogenes Laertius, Leben und Meinungen …, t. 2, Von Otto Apelt, unter Mitarbeit von H.G. Zekl, Hamburg 1967 (second edition).
14. Diogenis Laerti, De darorum phílosophorum vitis, dogmatibus et apophtegmatibus. Libri decern ex italids codidbus nunc primus excussis recensuit, C. Gabr. Cobet … Parisis, Ed. Ambrosia Firmin Didot … MDCCCV.
15. Fraisse, Philiá, p. 238.
16. Without jumping the gun, without neglecting a leap which resembles an infinite leap, let us nevertheless take note of the numerous analogies which regularly align Christian friendship or fraternity with the Aristotelian, even Ciceronian, tradition. The rule of religious orders in retreat, starting from a certain date, includes a recommendation of scarcity for monks: ‘Those wishing to live as monks in a hermitage are allowed to be as many as three, four maximum’, we read in the Opuscules of Saint Francis of Assisi (cited in La Règle des frères mineurs, Éditions françiscaines, Paris 1961, p. 58).
17. On particular present-day aspects around this ‘performative contradiction’, I must refer the reader to Mémoires-pour Paul de Man, ch. III.
18. On this point we must refer the reader to ‘Signature Event Context’ in Margins of Philosophy [trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press 1982] and to Limited Inc. [trans. Samuel Weber, 2nd edn, Evanston, II: Northwestern University Press 1990].
19. ‘Aristotle on Friendship’, the appendix to La Prudence chez Aristotle, PUF, 1963, p. 180. This five-page essay forcefully establishes a series of conflicts or contradictions that concern not only ‘friendships that are imperfect, or grounded in some misunderstanding’ but ‘the very essence of friendship’ (ibid., Aubenque’s emphasis).
20. ‘Aítion d’óti ēmin men to eu kath’éteron, ekeino de autos autou to eu estín.’ Eudemian Ethics, VII, 12, 1245b 14–19, quoted and translated by Aubenque, p. 183.
1. [Trans. C. Cocks, London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1846], pp. 45–52; emphasis added.
2. Trans. John P. McKay, Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press 1973, p. 191; emphasis added.
3. Michelet, Le Peuple, introduction and notes P. Viallaneix, Paris: Flammarion 1984, p. 57. Emphasis added. As a footnote points out: ‘the friendship between the two men … never lapsed’. Initiated by Victor Cousin into the philosophy of history, one translating Vico and the other Herder, simultaneously, together at ‘the College de France in 1842, united in the struggle against the priest-party, they mutually dedicate the two works I have just cited. And do not hesitate, if one is to judge by the choice of words, to talk to one another like a Montaigne and a La Boétie, who would have grown old together at the Collège de France.
4. 1856, Book V, Chapter 6, ‘Does unity obtain?’, Vienna: Manz, p. 305.
5. Here I allow a reference to ‘Before the law’ [trans. Avital Ronell, enlarged trans. Christine Roulston, in Derek Attridge (ed.) Acts of Literature, London: Roudedge 1992 (1985)].
6. See ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference [trans. Alan Bass, London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Roudedge & Kegan Paul 1978].
7. [‘tout autre est tout autre’: I have followed here David Wills’s translation, in Derrida, The Gift of Death, University of Chicago Press 1995, ch. 4, pp. 82–8. – Trans.]
8. Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 9, 1159a 25–30.
9. See ‘all’ outîē alethîēs outîē pseudes’. On certain stakes of this proposition which are crucial today, see ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ [trans. Ken Frieden, in Sandford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds., Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, New York: Columbia University Press 1989], pp. 3–70.
10. Quoted by François Furet and Mona Ozouf in the fine article devoted to this theme in their Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, pp. 199ff. We learn, among so many other things in this work, that Leroux ‘prefers to place fraternity in the middle of the motto, as the affective term linking freedom and equality’ (p. 212). For Louis Blanc and Buchez, on the other hand, fraternity should appear first, at the origin or principle, as its divine origin dictates.
The Christian roots of the motif explain at once the attraction and the repulsion of a ‘fraternity’, its to-and-fro movements throughout revolutionary and post-revolutionary history:
For where else can we find a better justification for the ‘consanguinity established by nature among the inhabitants of the earth’; where else, then, a justification of fraternity, than in the Christian religion? … This consciousness of a link between the Christian message and the Revolution was to find its full use in federative ceremonies, in dramaturgies of the abolition of differences: the priests celebrating them recall that, to create a perfect society, all particular interests must be snuffed out, as in the example of this invention of Christ, ‘gentle fraternity’.… The Gospel itself intended – Fauchet’s federative oath stresses the point – ‘to spread over all the earth the sacred fire of universal fraternity’ … the link between Christianity and Revolution … explains the appearance, at the sides of freedom and equality, of fraternity, to achieve what was felt as another Trinity, (pp. 202–3)
Analysing the phenomena of fraternization, recalling the ‘obsession of the [fraternal] oath’, the habit of greeting, from 1791, as ‘brothers and friends’, of signing ‘salvation and fraternity’, the same article rightly stresses the ‘infinite enlargement’ (p. 204) of fraternization, this potential of infinitization which is so important to us here and in which, above, we could identify a Christian logic only after acknowledging also, in the same move, with all its subsequent consequences, the deployment of a Greek memory. When have these two memories been more efficiently coupled, and come face to face, than in the ideal instant of what is called the French Revolution?
11. Le Peuple, pp. 178, 181, 190, 190, 191.
12. Preface to the 1866 edition, p. 247.
13. Ibid., p. 210.
14. Ibid., p. 305. Emphasis added. The following ‘scene’ should be read, really read: in a bed, between spouses who love each other. Nothing is missing: they are talking about a political ‘secret’, an ‘enemy of public welfare’, a wanted criminal, an enemy of law and justice. The husband hesitates to ‘betray law, justice’, to give ‘a victory to injustice’. The wife: ‘But you are saving your enemy.… Be great.… And be good to me. Make this beautiful sacrifice for me. It will make me feel young again.’
Yes. What was stated above is now confirmed: ‘Woman is always higher or lower than justice. Love, holiness, chivalry, magnanimity, honour; all of that she feels marvellously, but law she feels more slowly’ (p. 304).
15. Günther Neske, Pfullingen 1956. What is Philosophy was a lecture given in Cérisy-la-Salle, Normandy, in August 1955. [Trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback, Albany, New York, NCUP.]
16. ‘The phileîn to sophón, that already mentioned harmony with sophón, harmonía, thus became órexis [yearning], a striving for sophin. Sophón – the being in Being – is now especially sought. Because the loving is no longer an original harmony with sophón but is a particular striving towards sophón, the loving of sophón becomes “phílosophía”. The striving is determined by Eros’ (English trans, p. 51].
17. We have broached this task in a still preliminary way in ‘Heidegger’s Ear, Philopolemology, Geschlecht IV [trans. John P. Leavey, Jr, in J. Sallis (ed.) Reading Heidegger, Indiana University Press 1991].
18. Being and Time, para 34 [trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper 1962], p. 163.
19. ‘Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference.’ Research in Phenomenology, XIII, 1983, 64–85. Also ‘Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II)’ [trans. John P. Leavey Jr in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, Chicago University Press 1987].
20. See also Heidegger’s text under the same title in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, Klostermann, Frankfurt-am-Main 1951. Jean Launay translated it into French under the title ‘Souvenir’, in Approche de Hölderlin, Paris: Gallimard 1973. Having noted that ‘the unison of the same thoughts and hence coappurtenance are revealed as the substance and constancy of friendship’, Heidegger quotes the verse ‘But where are the friends? Bellarmin/with his comrades?’. Heidegger dwells at length on the unicity of this ‘true question’ (there is no other in the poem) which might well be addressed to friends – the only ones who speak, who speak to each other and are in agreement – rather than posed on the subject of friends (p. 163). One would have to follow up more thoroughly than is possible here the Heideggerian meditation on the singular One, the ‘More than one’ (‘More than one/Is reluctant to go to the source’) and the ‘Now it is that I am alone’, from the standpoint of which the poetic meaning of the question ‘But where are the friends?’ is announced: ‘We know them not. The other has already arrived home. He has begun now, at home, what can properly be called the way to the source’ (pp. 175–6).
21. I shall take up this question in a forthcoming essay (Geschlecht III), and refer the reader to the remarkable works of David Farrell Krell, especially Intimations of Mortality, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park and London 1986, pp. 163ff; and to ‘Passage à la soeur, Heidegger et Geschlecht’, in Le Passage des frontières, Galilée 1994, p. 459.
22. See the 1943–44 course on Heraclitus, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Manfred S. Frings, 1979, Bnd 55, pp. 127ff.
23. Gönnen, Gewähren. ‘In der phúsis waltet die Gunst, p. 132. We have stressed these heavily charged words ‘walten’ (reign, dominate, prevail) and ‘Gewalt’ (force, violence, power, etc.) in ‘Heidegger’s Ear’ and in ‘Force of Law’.
24. ‘Wirverstehen das phileîn als die Gunst und das Gȯnnen’ (p. 136).
25. ‘In the Greek world, there is no psychology. Aristotle’s treatise Perí Psukhés has nothing to do with a “psychology”. In the accomplishment of metaphysics, metaphysics becomes “psychology” – that is, psychology and anthropology are the last word of metaphysics: psychology and technics go hand in hand.’ Ibid., p. 130.
26. Schmitt, CP, p. 26.
27. Ibid., pp. 27–8.
28. Ibid., pp. 35–6; emphasis added.
29. Ibid., pp. 49–50.
30. Preface to CP, p. 17 of the German edition. This preface recalls the retrospective proposed in Nomos der Erde, 1950.
31. Ibid., p. 18 of the German edition.
32. ‘Überwindung der Metaphysik’, in Vorträge und Aufiätze, Neske 1954, pp. 88–9. The quoted section, later published in the Darmstadt Cahier Barlach, is from fragment XXVI of notebooks from 1936 to 1946. [The English translation, ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’, is by Joan Stambaugh in Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, London: Souvenir Press 1975, pp. 103–4.]
33. We hope we have demonstrated this in ‘Heidegger’s Ear’.
34. ‘On Friendship’, p. 212 [translation slightly modified].
35. It constitutes precisely the Conclusion of the Elements of Ethics in the Doctrine of Virtue, Metaphysics of Morals, second part, paras 46–7, [trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge University Press 1991].
36. See above, Chapter 8, pp. 204–5.
37. On this point the reader can consult the extraordinary Appendix on ‘virtues of society (virtutes homileticae)’, and read what is said about humanitas aesthetica, which adds grace to virtue. Grace is not virtue; it belongs to these exterior works, these ornaments, these parerga of virtue, to be sure, but to add grace to virtue is a duty of virtue! Even if this be a matter of ‘small change’, like ‘sweetness of language’, ‘politeness’, ‘hospitality’, the ‘ease with which one lets oneself be approached’, etc., – in a word, neither friendship nor friendliness, but amiability. We shall meet this ‘small change’ in a moment, in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.
38. Kant, p. 264. Emphasis added [translation modified].
39. Victor Hugo, ‘L’avenir’, in Paris (Introduction to the Paris Guide), Paris 1867, pp. 5, 9, 11–15.
40. ‘Suprématie de Paris’, in ibid., pp. 54, 60, 62, 63, 67, 72, 74.
41. ‘Fonction de Paris’, in ibid., p. 83. The meaning of spectre is different here, but up to what point? The relation is not that of simple homonymy. (‘The hearth of reason is necessarily the hearth of art. Paris enlightens in both respects; on one side real life, on the other ideal life.… Truth bestows pristine light; by cutting through this strange milieu called the past, it remains light and becomes volume. One of the powers of genius is that it is a prism. It remains reality and becomes imagination. Great poetry is the solar spectre of human reason.’) The first poem of the youthful period of the author of ‘Phantoms’ was a classic ‘Ode to Friendship’. This poem, the first to be chosen for Hugo’s Cahiers de vers français, sings of Castor and Pollux, Orestes and Pylades, the name and the virtues.
42. ‘Peace Declaration’, in Paris pp. 104–6, 110, 114, 118–24.
1. From one of Ferenczi’s letters to Freud; see below, p. 280
2. Book Four, para. 279, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, Vintage 1974, pp. 225–226.
3. [See the epigraph to Derrida’s Of Grammatology: the future is ‘that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity’: trans. Gayatri Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press 1976, p. 5. – Trans.]
4. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, [trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press 1978], p. 38.
5. See above, ch. 9, pp. 257–8.
6. ‘ésti gar o phílos állos autos’, Nicomachean Ethics, IX, 4, 1166a 32. Aristotle posits here that man, with his friend, is in a relation similar to the one he has to himself. He then defers the question of whether there can be friendship between a man and himself, only to return to it further on, answering in the affirmative. It is in terms of this friendship for self that friendship can extend to other men. The best I can wish for my best friend is what I wish for myself in the highest degree (1168b 5).
7. Montaigne, Essays, p. 212.
8. ‘Mein Bruder, wenn du eine Tugend hast, und es deine Tugend ist, so hast du sie mit niemandem gemeinsam’ [trans. R. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics 1961].
9. “Einer ist immer zu viel um mich” – also denkt der Einsiedler. “Immer einmal eins – das gibt auf die Dauer zwei!”
Ich und Mich sind immer su eifrig im Gespräche: wie wäre es auzuhalten, wenn es nicht einen Freund gäbe?
“Immer ist für den Einsiedler der Freund der Dritte: der Dritte ist der Kork, der verhindert, daß das Gespräch der Zweie in die Tiefe sinkt”’, Vom Freunde, in Also sprach Zarathustra [trans. R. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin 1961], p. 82.
10. And even of sacrificial ‘carno-phallogocentrism’. See Points de suspension, Galilée 1992, p. 294 [Points …: Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others, Stanford University Press 1995], pp. 280–81.
11. Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 2, 1155a 25.
12. Ibid., 10, 1160b 18–20.
13. Eudemian Ethics, VII, 9, 1241b 30.
14. Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 15, 1162b 20; Eudemian Ethics, VII, 10, 1242b 30.
15. The brother’s name or the name of brother: Montaigne again, on his friendship with La Boétie: ‘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’ p. 208).
16. Before the Law.
17. Budapest, 26 December 1912, in The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, vol. 1, 1908–14 [trans. Peter T. Hoffer, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London 1993], pp. 449–51.
18. On all these problems, and again on the ethico-political question of the woman/wife, the sister, and the brother in Hegel, I refer the reader to Glas, Galilée 1974 [trans. John P. Leavey Jr and Richard Rand, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 1986],
19. The Gospel According to Matthew, V, 43–8 [trans. Members of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, from The New American Bible, World Publishing 1972]. This is evidently the passage to which Schmitt refers (see above, ch. 4, pp. 88–9).
20. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 87–8.
21. ‘You want to be paid as well, you the virtuous! Do you want reward for virtue and heaven for earth and eternity for your today?’, ibid. ‘Of the Virtuous’, p. 117. The reference is undoubtedly, among many other possibilities, to the Gospel according to Matthew, cited above. But the logic of wages is everywhere in the Gospels.
23. In a recent and beautiful essay, Alexander Garciá Düttmann says of this passage and of ‘Star Friendships’ that it is a question of an ‘originary alter-ation’ qua a non-dialectizable, non-relevable, un-sublatable distancing. See ‘What is called Love in all the Languages and Silences of the World: Nietzsche, Genealogy, Contingency’, in Imago, Fall 1993, p. 314.
24. Montaigne, ‘On Friendship, p. 220.
25. Ibid., pp. 206–7.
26. L’Amitié, Gallimard 1971, pp. 328–9. Emphasis added.
27. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster [trans. Ann Smock, Bison Book Edition, University of Nebraska Press 1995], p. 27.
28. Elsewhere I have suggested the opposite: that the gift ought to exclude the too natural value of generosity. See Donner le temps, Galilée 1991, p. 205 [trans. Peggy Kamuf, Given Time, 1. Counterfeit Money, University of Chicago Press 1992], p. 162.
29. Fata Morgana 1986, pp. 63–4 [trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Zone Books 1987], pp. 108–9.
30. The work of the lost friend should not be ‘praised’ – it is the same word as the one used in the text on Bataille, so many years before, which we cited above: ‘if only to praise him’.
31. Le Comité. Confessions d’un lecteur de grande maison, Champ Vallon 1988, pp. 88–9.
32. ‘… the heart of fraternity: the heart of the law’, p. 47.
‘The problem of being committees of action without action, or circles of friends which would disown their former friendships in the name of an appeal to friendship (comradeship without preconditions) which would carry the exigency of being there, not as a person or subject, but as the demonstration of a brotherly, anonymous, and impersonal movement.
The presence of the “people” in its limitless power which, so as not to limit itself, accepts to do nothing’, (p. 55)
33. A letter to Salomon Malka, L’Arche, no. 373, May 1988. Emphasis added, obviously.
34. Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘Qui êtes-vous?’, Interview with F. Poirié, La Manufacture, 1987, pp. 84–5, cited in M.A. Lescourret, Emmanuel Lévinas, Flammarion 1994, p. 121.