The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
about them?
Friendship does not keep silence, it is preserved by silence. From its first word to itself, friendship inverts itself Hence it says, saying this to itself, that there are no more friends; it avows itself in avowing that. Friendship tells the truth – and this is always better left unknown.
The protection of this custody guarantees the truth of friendship, its ambiguous truth, that by which friends protect themselves from the error or the illusion on which friendship is founded – more precisely, the bottomless bottom founding a friendship, which enables it to resist its own abyss. To resist the vertigo or the revolution that would have it turning around itself. Friendship is founded, in truth, so as to protect itself from the bottom, or the abyssal bottomless depths.
That is why friendship had better preserve itself in silence, and keep silent about the truth. Over the abyss, on the shifting ground of our friendships: ‘how uncertain (unsicher) is the ground upon which all our alliances and friendships rest, … how isolated (vereinsamt, solitary, insularized, ‘solitarized’) each man is’ (ibid.); that is what you will say to yourself, with so much experience of ‘misunderstandings’, ‘ruptures’, ‘hostile fleeings’ [‘fuites hostiles’]. So you had better keep silent about this truth of truth. The truth of truth is that the truth is there to protect a friendship that could not resist the truth of its illusion. Nietzsche affects a mystical tone when he puts forward aphoristic precepts and sentences (Spruche) that he then names, in Latin, Silentium. Asceticism, kenosis, knowledge of how to evacuate words to gain breathing space for friendship. Here again, Nietzsche thinks silence from the standpoint of friendship, as though silence itself could not be spoken about, as though it could not be spoken elsewhere than in friendship, by friendship. Speech ruins friendship; it corrupts by speaking, degrades, belittles, undoes the speech (verredet) of friendship; but this evil is done to it on account of truth. If silence must be kept among friends, concerning friends, this is just as much so as not to tell the truth, a murderous truth. ‘Silentium. One should not talk (reden) about one’s friends: otherwise one will talk away the feeling of friendship (sonst verredet man sich das Gefühl der Freundschaft).’5
Not that friends should keep silent, among themselves or on the subject of their friends. Their speech would perhaps have to breathe with an implied silence. This is nothing other than a certain way of speaking: secret, discreet, discontinuous, aphoristic, elliptic, just in disjointed time to avow the truth that must be concealed; hiding it – because it is deadly – to save life. To avow or not to avow – what difference does it make, since the avowal consists in hiding the truth even more safely? What is the truth of a confession? Not the veracity of what it says, but its confessional truth?
At least for the time being, let us speak this moment of avowal, for perhaps, perhaps the day of joy will come when the living fool (that I am) will dare to exclaim: ‘there is no enemy!’. This day of joy, as we recall, will be one of a shared rejoicing (Mitfreude), not fellow-suffering (Mitleid). For there would then be two communities without community, two friendships of solitude, two ways of saying to oneself – keeping silent, keeping it hushed – that solitude is irremediable and friendship impossible; two ways for desire to share and to parcel out the impossible: one would be the compassionate and negative way, the other affirmative, which would attune and join two disjointed rejoicings [jouissances] conjugated at the heart of the dissociation itself: heterogeneous allies, co-affirmed, perhaps affirmed in total darkness. An ecstatic rejoicing but one without plenitude, a communion of infinite wrenching.
In the meantime, in the course of the first avowal’s moment, which still belongs to the community of compassion, you had better keep silence to preserve what remains of friendship. And as the friends know this truth of truth (the custody of what cannot be kept), they had better keep silent together. As in a mutual agreement. A tacit agreement, however, whereby those who are separated come together without ceasing to be what they are destined to be – and undoubtedly what they more than ever are: dissociated, ‘solitarized’, singularized, constituted into monadic alterities (vereinsamt); where, as the phenomenologist says, what is proper to the alter ego will never be accessible, as such, to an originarily bestowing intuition, but only to an analogical apresentation. These two are not in solidarity with one another; they are solitary, but they ally themselves in silence within the necessity of keeping silent together – each, however, in his own comer. This is, perhaps, a social bond, a contemporaneity, but in the common affirmation of being unbonded, an untimely being-alone and, simultaneously, in joint acquiescence to disjunction. How can you be together to bear witness to secrecy, separation, singularity? You would have to testify where testimony remains impossible. You would have to witness the absence of attestation, and testify in behalf of that absence, as Blanchot says (‘Speech still to be spoken beyond the living and the dead, testifying for the absence of attestation.’6) How can one be silent, one and the other, one the very other [l’un l’autre même]?
This ‘miteinander Schweigen’ can always come to ruin our ontological assurances, our common sense, our concept of the concept, the One of the common that has always commanded our thought as well as our politics of friendship. How can a politics of separation be founded? Nietzsche dares to recommend separation, he dares to prescribe distancing in the code excluding distance, in this very distance, and as if he were provoking it, in the language that remains as much that of friendship as that of politics, of state, of family (affinity, kinship, Verwandschaft, appurtenance, the co-appurtenance of identity: Zusammengehorigkeit):
In parting (Im Scheiden). It is not in how one soul approaches another but in how it distances itself from it that I recognize their affinity and relatedness (Verwandschaft und Zusammengehorigkeit).7
What is keeping silent? Keeping silent among friends, unter Freunden, in the rupture (im Scheiden), in the interruption that substitutes, as it must (for in silence, everything must be possible), testimony for know-how, faith for the test, ‘fidence’ for demonstration, the perhaps for certainty, the other for the same, friendship for calculation, etc.? The imperative and the enigma of the sense of decency [pudeur] are not far off; we shall link them in a moment to the perhaps, to the truth and to the question of sexual difference – in Nietzsche’s writing, his silence, his erasure without erasure.
Perhaps this is an altogether different way of thinking the ‘among’, of apprehending the ‘among friends’, from within the silence of friends – and not the opposite. A particular ‘among’ would be incommensurable to all others. This is when the end begins, the incipit of the epilogue, the advent of the first verses of the Nachspiel whose second stanza we quoted. Silence among friends will not work without laughter, and laughter bares its teeth, as does death. And the more evil it is, the better. Doing and laughing, machen/lachen, doing evil and laughing at evil, making each other laugh about evil. Among friends. Not laughing evil away, but making ourselves laugh at evil. Among friends.
(You will not, perhaps, have failed to register the fact that we are writing and describing friends as masculine – neuter-masculine. Do not consider this a distraction or a slip. It is, rather, a laborious way of letting a question furrow deeper. We are perhaps borne from the very first step by and towards this question: what is a friend in the feminine, and who, in the feminine, is her friend? Why do ‘our’ philosophers and ‘our’ religions, our ‘culture’, acknowledge so little irreducible right, so little proper and acute signification, in such grammar? In an unpublished passage of Beyond Good and Evil – precisely around paragraph 2 on the ‘dangerous perhaps’ of the ‘new philosophers’ which we were questioning above – Nietzsche will have bequeathed us a certain number of unerased sentences. They take the movement of truth up into the folds of a veil, and this is always ‘truth’ suspended between inverted commas, the veiled truth of decency, as Nietzsche often says. But some of these phrases also inscribe the ‘perhaps’, which is never dissociated from veiled decency, in a staging of feminine seduction where it would be arduous to distribute place, praise, and blame. The veil, and decency too, may signify the absence of courage. In the first draft, in the insistent mode of ‘perhaps’, and not far from the ‘dangerous perhaps’, we can read,