The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

In its present form, opened by a vocative (‘O my friends’), its form is thus that of an address – hazardous, without the least assurance, at the time of what was only the first session of a seminar conducted with this title, ‘Politics of Friendship’, in 1988–89. The trajectory of an introduction of this sort is here quite long, certainly, but it is strictly respected throughout its argumentation, stage by stage, in its scansion, in its logical schema as well as in most of its references. Hence the explanation, if not the justification, of the inchoate form of the project: preliminary rather than problematic.

I count on preparing for future publication a series of seminar studies within which this one actually finds its place, well beyond this single opening session, which thus presupposes its premisses and its horizon. Those that immediately preceded it, then, if it is anything but useless to recall the logical development at this point, were centred on: Nationality and Philosophical Nationalism (1. Nation, Nationality, Nationalism [1983–84]; 2. Nomos, Logos, Topos [1984–85]; 3. The Theological-Political [1985–86]; 4. Kant, the Jew, the German [1986–87]); and Eating the Other (Rhetorics of Cannibalism) [1987–88]. Subsequent seminars concerned Questions of Responsibility through the experience of the secret and of witnessing [1989–93].

Be it artifice or abstraction, if I here detach one of these numerous sessions, and only the first for the moment, it is because, for apparently contingent reasons, this session gave birth to several conferences.¹ In addition, this session has already been published abroad, in slightly different, generally abridged versions.²

In the course of the academic year 1988–89, each session opened with these words from Montaigne, quoting a remark attributed to Aristotle: ‘O my friends, there is no friend’. Week after week, its voices, tones, modes and strategies were tried on, to see if its interpretation could then be sparked, or if the scenography could be set in motion around itself. This work, taking its time, replays, represents, only the first session. This representation thus repeats less a first act than a sort of preview. It is no doubt anything but a primal scene, although the figure of the friend, so regularly coming back on stage with the features of the brother – who is critically at stake in this analysis – seems spontaneously to belong to a familial, fratemalist and thus androcentric configuration of politics.

Why would the friend be like a brother? Let us dream of a friendship which goes beyond this proximity of the congeneric double, beyond parenthood, the most as well as the least natural of parenthoods, when it leaves its signature, from the outset, on the name as on a double mirror of such a couple. Let us ask ourselves what would then be the politics of such a ‘beyond the principle of fraternity’.

Would this still deserve the name ‘polities’?

The question is no doubt valid for all ‘political regimes’, but it is undoubtedly more crucial with respect to what is called democracy – if, at least, one still understands by this term the name of a regime which, as is well known, will always have been problematic.

The concept of politics

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The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

The Politics of Friendship

THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

Contents

Foreword