The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
in our century and beyond, have not broken any more radically than Nietzsche with the Greek or Christian canon of friendship – that is, with a certain politics, a certain type of democracy.)
These philosophers of a new species will accept the contradiction, the opposition or the coexistence of incompatible values. They will seek neither to hide this possibility nor to forget it; nor will they seek to surmount it. And this is where madness looms; but here, too, its urgency indeed calls for thought. In the same paragraph, Beyond Good and Evil opens our ears, and delivers the definition of the fool we need to understand the ‘living fool’ of Human All Too Human, such as he presents himself (I who shout, who exclaim, I the living fool, ruf ich, der lebende Τοr); at the very moment when he turns the address into its antithesis, when the friends become the enemies or when suddenly there are no more enemies. What in fact does Beyond Good and Evil say to us? That one must be mad, in the eyes of the ‘metaphysicians of all ages’, to wonder how something might (konnte) rise up out of its antithesis; to wonder if, for example, truth might be born of error, the will to truth or the will to deceive, the disinterested act of egotism, etc. How is one to ask a question of this kind without going mad? Such a genesis (Entstehung) of the antithesis would end up contradicting its very origin. It would be an anti-genesis. It would wage war on its own lineage, as the ‘metaphysician of all ages’ believes; this would be tantamount to a monstrous birth, an ‘impossible’ origin (‘Solcherlei Entstehung ist unmoglich’). Anyone who merely dreams of such a possibility (wer davon traumt) immediately goes mad; this is already a fool (ein Narr). Here we have yet another way of defining, from the impossible thought of this impossible, both the direct lineage and the dream – and its madness.
Perhaps! (Vielleicht!) But who is willing to concern himself with such dangerous perhapses! For that we have to await the arrival of a new species of philosopher (einer neuen Gattung von Philosophen), one which possesses tastes and inclinations opposite to and different from (umgekehrten) those of its predecessors – philosophers of the dangerous ‘perhaps’ (Philosophen des gefahrlichen Vielleicht) in every sense. – And to speak in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers arising (Ich sehe solche neue Philosophen heraufkommen).11
Nietzsche renews the call; he puts through – from a different place – this teleiopoetic or telephone call to philosophers of a new species. To those of us who already are such philosophers, for in saying that he sees them coming, in saying they are coming, in feigning to record their coming (further on: Eine neue Gattung von Philosophen kommt herauf12), he is calling, he is asking, in sum, ‘that they come’ in the future. But to be able to say this, from the standpoint of the presumed signer, these new philosophers – from the standpoint of what is being written, from where we (Nietzsche and his followers) are writing to one another – must already have arrived. Nietzsche makes the call with an apostrophe to his addressee, asking him to join up with ‘us’, with this ‘us’ which is being formed, to join us and to resemble us, to become the friends of the friends that we are! Strange friends. What are we doing, in fact, we the friends that we are, we who are calling for new philosophers, we who are calling you to resemble and to join up with us in shared enjoyment (Mitfreude, this is what ‘makes the friend’; macht den Freund, as we read elsewhere,13Mitfreude and not Mitleiden, joy among friends, shared enjoyment [jouissance] and not shared suffering)? What are we doing and who are we, we who are calling you to share, to participate and to resemble? We are first of all, as friends, the friends of solitude, and we are calling on you to share what cannot be shared: solitude. We are friends of an entirely different kind, inaccessible friends, friends who are alone because they are incomparable and without common measure, reciprocity or equality. Therefore, without a horizon of recognition. Without a familial bond, without proximity, without oikeiótēs.
Without truth? We should wait and see. What truth is there for a friendship without proximity, without presence, therefore without resemblance, without attraction, perhaps even without significant or reasonable preference? How can such a friendship even be possible, except in a figure? Why still call this ‘friendship’ except in a misuse of language and a diversion of a semantic tradition? How could we not only be the friends of solitude, born friends (gebomen), sworn friends (geschwomen), jealous friends of solitude (eifersuchtigen Freunde der Einsamkeit), but then invite you to become a member of this singular community?
How many of us are there? Does that count? And how do you calculate?
Thus is announced the anchoritic community of those who love in separation [who love to stand aloof: qui aiment à s’éloigner]. The invitation comes to you from those who can love only at a distance, in separation [qui n’aiment qu’ à se séparer au loin]. This is not all they love, but they love; they love lovence, they love to love – in love or in friendship – providing there is this withdrawal. Those who love only in cutting ties are the uncompromising friends of solitary singularity. They invite you to enter into this community of social disaggregation [déliaison], which is not necessarily a secret society, a conjuration, the occult sharing of esoteric or crypto-poetic knowledge. The classical concept of the secret belongs to a thought of the Community, solidarity or the sect – initiation or private space which represents the very thing the friend who speaks to you as a friend of solitude has rebelled against.
How can this be? Is it not a challenge to good sense and to sense tout court? Is it possible?
It is perhaps impossible, as a matter of fact. Perhaps the impossible is the only possible chance of something new, of some new philosophy of the new. Perhaps; perhaps, in truth, the perhaps still names this chance. Perhaps friendship, if there is such a thing, must honour [faire droit] what appears impossible here. Let us, then, underscore once again the perhaps (vielleicht) of a sentence, the one ending the second section of Beyond Good and Evil, entitled ‘The free spirit’ (para. 44).
After the ‘frog perspective’, with the eye of the toad – on the same side but also on the other – we have the eye of the owl, an eye open day and night, like a ghost in the immense Nietzschean bestiary; but here too, above all, we have the scarecrow, the disquieting simulacrum, the opposite of a decoy: an artifact in rags and tatters, an automaton to frighten birds – the Vogelscheuchen that we are and should be in the world of today, if we are to save, with madness and with singularity itself the friendship of the solitary and the chance to come of a new philosophy. We shall focus on a moment of this clamour – only the conclusion of this long-winded [au long souffle] address. It should be allowed to ring out in a loud voice in its entirety, and in its original language. In the light of the night, for this solitude of which we are jealous is that of ‘midday and midnight’. Before quoting these few lines, let us recall, however, that this passage begins with an attack on a certain concept of the free spirit, of free thought. Nietzsche denounces the freethinkers, the levellers with their enslaved pens – in the service not of democracy, as they sometimes claim, but of ‘democratic taste’ and, in quotation marks, ‘modern ideas’. It is out of the question to oppose some non-freedom to the freedom of these free spirits (since they are in truth slaves); only additional freedom. These philosophers of the future (diese Philosophen der Zukunft) that Nietzsche says are coming will also be free spirits, ‘very free’ spirits (freie, sehr freie Geister). But through this superlative and this surplus of freedom, they will also be something greater and other, something altogether other, fundamentally other (Grundlich-Anderes). As for what will be fundamentally other, I will say that the philosophers of the future will be at once both its figure and its responsibility (although Nietzsche does not put it in this way). Not because they will come, if they do, in the future, but because these philosophers of the future already are philosophers capable of thinking the future, of carrying and sustaining the future – which is to say, for the metaphysician allergic to the perhaps, capable of enduring the intolerable, the undecidable and the terrifying. Such philosophers already exist, something like the Messiah (for the teleiopoesis we are speaking of is a messianic structure) whom someone addresses, here and now, to inquire when he will come.14 We are not yet among these philosophers of the future, we who are calling them and calling them the philosophers of