The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
the metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps (vielleicht) merely foreground valuations, merely provisional perspectives, perhaps (vielleicht) moreover the perspectives of a hole-and-corner, perhaps from below, as it were ‘frog-perspectives’ (Frosch-Perpecktiven gleichsam), to borrow an expression employed by painters.7
The transmutation to which Nietzsche submits the concept of virtue – sometimes, as has often been remarked,8 also in the Machiavellian sense of virtù – shudders in the tremor of this perhaps. In other words, in what is still to come, perhaps. This is something other than a reversal. The famous passage on ‘Our virtues’ (para. 214) from the same book turns resolutely towards us, towards ourselves, towards the ‘Europeans of the day after tomorrow’ that we are, and, first of all, towards the ‘first-born of the twentieth century’. It invites us, we the ‘last Europeans’, to be done with the pigtail and the wig of ‘good conscience’, the ‘belief in one’s own virtue (an seine eigne Tugend glauben)’. And here again, the shudder of the sentence, the shudder of an arrow of which it is still not known where and how far it will go, the vibration of a shaft of writing which, alone, promises and calls for a reading, a preponderance to come of the interpretative decision. We do not know exactly what is quivering here, but we perceive, in flight, at least a figure of the vibration. The prediction: ‘Alas! if only you knew how soon, how very soon, things will be – different! –’ (– Ach! Wenn ihr wuβtet, wie es bald, so bald schon – anders kommt!9).
What a sentence! Is it a sentence? Do we know that – that things will be different; and how very soon thing? will be different? Do we not already know that? Can that be measured by knowledge? If we knew that, things would no longer be different. We must not totally know this in order for a change to occur again. So, in order for this knowledge to be true, to know what it knows, a certain non-knowledge is necessary. But the non-knowledge of the one who says he knows that we do not know (‘Ah if you only knew’, a ploy or a figure which is neither a question nor an affirmation, not even a hypothesis, since you are going to know very soon, starting at the end of the sentence, that which you would know if you knew, and that therefore you already know: ‘Ah if you only knew!’) – to wit, what the person signing the said sentence (which is not a full sentence, but only an incomplete subordinate) cannot state without attributing to himself knowledge concerning what the other does not yet know, but already knows, having learned it in this instant – that is, instantaneously, and so soon (so bald) that it will not wait until the end of the sentence.
The acceleration in the change or the alteration which the sentence in suspension speaks (wie es bald, so bald schon – anders kommt!) is in truth only its very rapidity. An incomplete sentence rushes to its conclusion at the infinite speed of an arrow. The sentence speaks of itself, it gets carried away, precipitates and precedes itself, as if its end arrived before the end. Instantaneous teledromatics: the race is finished in advance, and this is future-producing. The circle is perhaps future-producing – this is what will have to be assumed, however impossible it may seem. As with what happens at every instant, the end begins, the sentence begins at the end. Infinite or nil speed, absolute economy, for the arrow carries its address along and implies in advance, in its very readability, the signature of the addressee. This is tantamount to saying that it withdraws from space by penetrating it. You have only to listen. It advances backwards; it outruns itself by reversing itself. It outstrips itself [elle se gagne de vitesse]. Here is an arrow whose flight would consist in a return to the bow: fast enough, in sum, never to have left it; and what the sentence says – its arrow – is withdrawn. It will nevertheless have reached us, struck home; it will have taken some time – it will, perhaps, have changed the order of the world even before we are able to awake to the realization that, in sum, nothing will have been said, nothing that will not already have been blindly endorsed in advance. And again, like a testament: for the natural miracle lies in the fact that such sentences outlive each author, and each specific reader, him, you and me, all of us, all the living, all the living presents.
By way of economy – and in order, in a single word, to formalize this absolute economy of the feint, this generation by joint and simultaneous grafting of the performative and the reportive, without a body of its own – let us call the event of such sentences, the ‘logic’ of this chance occurrence, its ‘genetics’, its ‘rhetoric’, its ‘historical record’, its ‘polities’, etc., teleiopoetic. Teleiopoiós qualifies, in a great number of contexts and semantic orders, that which renders absolute, perfect, completed, accomplished, finished, that which brings to an end. But permit us to play too with the other tele, the one that speaks to distance and the far-removed, for what is indeed in question here is a poetics of distance at one remove, and of an absolute acceleration in the spanning of space by the very structure of the sentence (it begins at the end, it is initiated with the signature of the other). Rendering, making, transforming, producing, creating – this is what counts; but, given that this happens only in the auto-tele-affection of the said sentence, in so far as it implies or incorporates its reader, one would – precisely to be complete – have to speak of auto-teleiopoetics. We shall say teleiopoetics for short, but not without immediately suggesting that friendship is implied in advance therein: friendship for oneself, for the friend and for the enemy. We all the more easily authorize ourselves to leave the self of the autos in the wings, since it appears here as the split effect rather than as the simple origin of teleiopoesis [téléiopoièse]. The inversion of repulsion into attraction is, in a way, engaged, analytically included, in the movement of phileîn. This is a logic that will have to be questioned: if there is no friend elsewhere than where the enemy can be, the ‘necessity of the enemy’ or the ‘one must love one’s enemies’ (seine Feinde lieben) straight away transforms enmity into friendship, etc. The enemies I love are my friends. So are the enemies of my friends. As soon as one needs or desires one’s enemies, only friends can be counted – this includes the enemies, and vice versa – and here madness looms. At each step, on the occasion of every teleiopoetic event. (No) more sense [Plus de sens]. That which is empty and that which overflows resemble one another, a desert mirage effect and the ineluctability of the event.
(Of course, we must quickly inform the reader that we will not follow Nietzsche here. Not in any simple manner. We will not follow him in order to follow him come what may. He never demanded such a thing anyway without freeing us, in the same move, from his very demand, following the well-known paradoxes of any fidelity. We will follow him here to the best of our ability in order, perhaps, to stop following him at one particular moment; and to stop following those who follow him – Nietzsche’s sons. Or those who still accompany him – to them we shall return much later – as his brothers or the brothers of his brothers. But this will be in order to continue, in his own way again, perhaps, turning the virtue of virtue against itself; to dig deeper under this ‘good conscience’ of the ‘last Europeans’ that continues to impel Nietzsche’s statements. This good conscience perhaps leaves on them a mark of the most unthought tradition – and the tradition of more than one tradition – all the way down to the overwhelming thought of friendship. This following without following will be undertaken in several stages, in varying rhythms, but it will also derive its authority from an avowal, however ironic it may be.
In ‘Our virtues’, Nietzsche continues to say ‘we’ in order to declare his appurtenance qua heir who still believes in his own virtues:
And is there anything nicer than to look for one’s own virtues? Does this not also mean: to believe in one’s own virtues? But this ‘believing in one’s virtue’ – is this not at bottom the same thing as that which one formerly called one’s ‘good conscience’, that venerable long conceptual pigtail which our grandfathers used to attach to the back of their heads and often enough to the back of their minds as well? It seems that, however little we may think ourselves old-fashioned and grand-fatherly-respectable in other respects, in one thing we are none the less worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, we last Europeans with a good conscience (wir letzsten Europaer mit gutem Gewissen): we too still wear their pigtail (ihren Zopf).’10
This good conscience of the last Europeans might well survive in Nietzsche’s head, beyond