The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida
who would love each other lovingly (is this still the right word?) in such a way that friendship, just once, perhaps, for the first time (another perhaps), once and only once, therefore for the first and last time (perhaps, perhaps), will become the correct name, the right and just name for that which would then have taken place, the condition being that it take place between two, ‘two people’, as Nietzsche specifies. But how can you adjust a name to what could take place only once, perhaps, for the first and last time? In other words – and in a much more general way this time – how can you name an event? For this love that would take place only once would be the only possible event: as an impossible event. Even if the right name for this unique love were to be found, how would you convince everyone else of its appropriateness? And what about the task of convincing the partner, at the moment of the act in which this love would essentially consist, that of giving him or her the name?
There would be no better way of honouring this chance than by quoting Nietzsche: Was alles Liebe gennant wird. But let us not quote him without underscoring in advance a point of logic, rhetoric – or onomastics: what might, then, very well happen, by chance, between two, between two in love, would cause no ripple in the calm waters of semantics. There would be no substituting or opposing: of one concept for another, one name for another, a friendship for a non-friendship, a friendship for an enmity, or a friendship for love. No, the ‘new’ that will perhaps come will be radically new – who knows? – but it might also take on the form of a development or a prolongation (Fortsetzung) of love. It would then be a new form of ‘lovence’, of the becoming-friendship of love, under the same name, but this time under the right same name, just for once, just this one time, adjusted rather to an incomparable time, unique and without a concept, at a particular date, between two. The friendship of these friends, if there are any of this kind, should their friendship take place one fine day, in the chance of a moment, an instant, with no assurance of duration, without the firm constancy of Aristotelian philía – this would be the condition of an improbable alliance in the thought of the perhaps. And since this thought to come is not a philosophy – at least, not a speculative, theoretical or metaphysical philosophy – not an ontology and not a theology, neither a representation nor a philosophical consciousness, at stake would be another experience of the perhaps: of thought as another experience of the perhaps. Hence another way of addressing, addressing oneself to the possible. Such a possible would no longer belong to the space of this possible, to the possibility of the possible whose concept would have assured its constancy, through so many mutations, from Aristotle to Hegel and Bergson. In order to open oneself to this other possibility of the possible, the word experience itself would have to refer to another concept. And attempt to translate itself if this other possibility were possible, into a political language. The price to pay, if this were necessary, would be having to change the meaning of the word ‘political’ – in other words, one would have to change politics.
Such a change to come is perhaps under way. But let us not be blind to the aporia that all change must endure. It is the aporia of the perhaps, its historical and political aporia. Without the opening of an absolutely undetermined possible, without the radical abeyance and suspense marking a perhaps, there would never be either event or decision. Certainly. But nothing takes place and nothing is ever decided without suspending the perhaps while keeping its living possibility in living memory. If no decision (ethical, juridical, political) is possible without interrupting determination by engaging oneself in the perhaps, on the other hand, the same decision must interrupt the very thing that is its condition of possibility: the perhaps itself. In the order of law, politics or morality, what would rules and laws, contracts and institutions indeed be without steadfast (bébaios) determination, without calculability and without violence done to the perhaps, to the possible that makes them possible? We insist on the decision in order to introduce the aporia in which all theory of decision must engage itself, notably in its apparently modern figures – for example, that of Schmittian decisionism, of its ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ or even neo-Marxist heritage, which we will take up later. Such a decisionism, as we know, is a theory of the enemy. And the figure of the enemy, condition of the political as such, takes shape in this century against the backdrop of its own loss: we would be losing the enemy, and thereby the political. But since when?
The aporia of the event intersects with, but also capitalizes or overdetermines, the aporia of decision with regard to the perhaps. There is no event, to be sure, that is not preceded and followed by its own perhaps, and that is not as unique, singular and irreplaceable as the decision with which it is frequently associated, notably in politics. But can one not suggest without a facile paradox, that the eventness of an event remains minimal, if not excluded, by a decision? Certainly the decision makes the event, but it also neutralizes this happening that must surprise both the freedom and the will of every subject – surprise, in a word, the very subjectivity of the subject, affecting it wherever the subject is exposed, sensitive, receptive, vulnerable and fundamentally passive, before and beyond any decision – indeed, before any subjectivation or objectivation. Undoubtedly the subjectivity of a subject, already, never decides anything; its identity in itself and its calculable permanence make every decision an accident which leaves the subject unchanged and indifferent. A theory of the subject is incapable of accounting for the slightest decision. But this must be said a fortiori of the event, and of the event with regard to the decision. For if nothing ever happens to a subject, nothing deserving the name ‘event’, the schema of decision tends regularly – at least, in its ordinary and hegemonic sense (that which seems dominant still in Schmittian decisionism, in his theory of exception and of sovereignty) – to imply the instance of the subject, a classic, free, and wilful subject, therefore a subject to whom nothing can happen, not even the singular event for which he believes to have taken and kept the initiative: for example, in an exceptional situation. But should one imagine, for all that, a ‘passive’ decision, as it were, without freedom, without that freedom? Without that activity, and without the passivity that is mated to it? But not, for all that, without responsibility? Would one have to show hospitality to the impossible itself – that is, to what the good sense of all philosophy can only exclude as madness or nonsense: a passive decision, an originarily affected decision? Such an undesirable guest can intrude into the closed space or the home ground of common sense only by recalling, as it were, so as to derive authority from it, an old forgotten invitation. It would thus recall the type or the silhouette of the classic concept of decision, which must interrupt and mark an absolute beginning. Hence it signifies in me the other who decides and rends. The passive decision, condition of the event, is always in me, structurally, another event, a rending decision as the decision of the other. Of the absolute other in me, the other as the absolute that decides on me in me. Absolutely singular in principle, according to its most traditional concept, the decision is not only always exceptional, it makes an exception for/of me. In me. I decide, I make up my mind in all sovereignty – this would mean: the other than myself, the me as other and other than myself, he makes or I make an exception of the same. This normal exception, the supposed norm of all decision, exonerates from no responsibility. Responsible for myself before the other, I am first of all and also responsible for the other before the other. This heteronomy, which is undoubtedly rebellious against the decisionist conception of sovereignty or of the exception (Schmitt), does not contradict; it opens autonomy on to itself, it is a figure of its heartbeat. It matches the decision to the gift, if there is one, as the other’s gift. The aporetic question ‘what can “to give in the name, to give to the name of the other” mean?’17 could translate into the question of the decision, the event, the exception, sovereignty, and so on. To give in the name of, to give to the name of, the other is what frees responsibility from knowledge – that is, what brings responsibility unto itself if there ever is such a thing. For yet again, one must certainly know, one must know it, knowledge is necessary if one is to assume responsibility, but the decisive or deciding moment of responsibility supposes a leap by which an act takes off, ceasing in that instant to follow the consequence of what is – that is, of that which can be determined by science or consciousness – and thereby frees itself (this is what is called freedom), by the act of its act, of what is therefore heterogeneous to it, that is, knowledge. In sum, a decision is unconscious – insane as that may