The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
are the friends. Only friends. The friends of truth are without the truth, even if friends cannot function without truth. The truth – that of the thinkers to come – it is impossible to be it, to be there, to have it; one must only be its friend. This also means one must be solitary – and jealous of one’s retreat. This is the anchoritic truth of this truth. But it is far from abstaining from afar from the political – and even if the anchorite plays the scarecrow, such a person overpoliticizes the space of the city.
Hence this remarkable redoubling of the perhaps (this time in the form of ‘in all probability’, wahrscheinlich genug) which responds to the question of knowing if, on their way or in the imminence of their arrival, the thinkers to come are ‘friends of the truth’. These friends of the truth that they will, perhaps, remain begin by denouncing a fundamental contradiction, that which no politics will be able to explain or rationalize, simply because it neither can nor has the right to do so: the contradiction inhabiting the very concept of the common and the community. For the common is rare, and the common measure is, a rarity for the rare, just as, not far from here, Baudelaire’s man of the crowds thought it. How many of them are there? How many of us are there? The incalculable equality of these friends of solitude, of the incommensurable subjects, of these subjects without subject and without intersubjectivity.
How can a democrat handle this friendship, this truth, this contradiction? And this measurelessness? I mean the democrat whom we know so well, who is really not familiar with such things? Above all, he is unfamiliar with the practice of putting ‘truth’ in quotation marks.
Let us listen, then. And first let us put into the present what the standard French translation deemed it necessary to render in a future tense. Those who are the future are on their way, now, even if these arrivants have not yet arrived: their present is not present, it is not in current affairs, but they are coming, they are arrivants because they are going to come. ‘Ils seront’ means: they are what is going to come, and what is to come is in the present tense; it speaks (in French) to the presentation of the future, sometimes planned, sometimes prescribed. In paragraph 43 of Beyond Good and Evil, the truth of these friends seems to be suspended between quotation marks:
Are they new friends of ‘truth’ (and not, as in the French translation, seront-ils, [will they be], Sind es neue Freunde der ‘Wahrheit), these coming philosophers (diese kommenden Philosophen)? In all probability ([c’est assez vraisemblable {ou probable}], Wahrscheinlich genug, the French translations give here ‘probably’, thus losing this allusion to the true; for this response to the question of truth, of friendship for the truth, cannot be true or certain, certainly, it can only have a true-semblance [vrai-semblance], but already orientated by friendship for the truth): for all philosophers have hitherto loved their truths.
I have underlined hitherto (bisher): we will come across its import again later. Their truths – theirs, without quotation marks this time – this is what the philosophers have loved. Is this not contradictory with truth itself? But if one must love truth (this is necessary, is it not?), how will one love anything other than one’s own truth, a truth that one can appropriate? Nietzsche’s answer (but how will a democrat handle it?): far from being the very form of truth, universalization hides the cunning of all dogmatisms. Being-common or being-in-common: a dogmatic stratagem, the cunning of the common sense of the community; what is placed in common can reason [raisonner] only in order to frame or set [arraisonner]. And as for the apparently arithmetical question, the question of the number of friends in which we have begun to perceive the Aristotelian dimension – the question of great numbers qua the political question of truth – we shall see that it does not fail to crop up here:
for all philosophers have hitherto loved their truths (ihre Wahrheiten). But certainly (Sicherlich aber) they will not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, and also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for everyman, which has hitherto (emphasis added) been the secret desire and hidden sense (Hintersinn) of all dogmatic endeavours. ‘My judgement is my judgement: another cannot easily acquire a right to it’ – such a philosopher of the future may perhaps (vielleicht, once again) say. One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many (mit Vielen ubereinstimmen zu wollen). ‘Good’ is no longer good when your neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there exist a ‘common good’ (‘Gemeingut’)!. The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little value. In the end it must be as it is and has always been: great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders (Schuder, also shivers or quivers or thrills) and delicacies (Zartheiten, also fragilities and weaknesses, etc.) for the refined (Feinen, the delicate, the subtle, the weak also, the vulnerable, for the aristocracy of this truth of election is both that of force and weakness, a certain manner of being able to be hurt), and, in sum (tm ganzin und kurzen), all rare things for the rare.21
So that is what this philosopher of the future will say, perhaps. That, perhaps, is what he would say, the friend of truth – but a mad truth, the mad friend of a truth which ignores both the common and common sense (‘I, the living fool’), the friend of a ‘truth’ in quotation marks that reverses all the signs in one stroke.
This Mad ‘Truth’: The Just Name of Friendship
It seems to me that the meditations of a man of state must centre on the question of enemies in all its aspects, and he owes it to himself to have taken a keen interest in this saying of Xenophon: ‘the wise man will profit from his enemies’. Consequently, I have collected the remarks I have recently made, in approximately the same terms, on this subject, and I will send them to you. I have abstained as much as possible from quoting what I had written in my Political Precepts, since I see that you often have this book in hand.1
Plutarch
A good-natured hare wanted to have many friends.
Many! you say – that is a major affair:
A single friend is a rare thing in these parts.
I agree, but my hare had this whim and didn’t know what
Aristotle used to say to young Greeks upon entering his school:
My friends, there are no friends.
Complacent, assiduous, always driven by zeal,
He wanted to make everyone a faithful friend,
And believed himself loved because he loved them.2
Florian
Now. Perhaps we are ready, now, to hear and understand the Nietzschean apostrophe, the cry of the ‘living fool that I am’: ‘Friends, there are no friends!’ (Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde!) Perhaps we are better exposed to it, there where its destination also depends on us. Its destiny, perhaps, rides on the event of a response that has come, like the responsibility of a countersignature, from its addressees. Who will come to countersign? What? How? How many?
The apostrophe resounds in Human All Too Human, in the chapter ‘Of friends’.3 It also plays with a tradition deeper and wider than any of us could fathom: Aristotle, Montaigne, Plutarch, Gradan – Oráculo manual – Florian, and so many others awaiting us. Most often they appeal to a wisdom, and this wisdom usually derives its authority from a political experience. In any case, it draws from such experience political lessons, moralities and precepts to be used by wise politicians.
Once again – we will hear it – the provocation strikes and opens with a ‘perhaps’. It opens as much as it opens up, it breaks in. The irreducible modality of the ‘perhaps’ always gives the opening note. ‘Perhaps’ gives it as a sharp rap is administered. ‘Perhaps’ gives it with the announcement of a first