The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

knows better than anyone, when he writes ‘In honour of friendship’,¹⁴ that he is speaking Greek and that his argument, illustrated with a tale, portrays a Greek possibility. He honours it, precisely. But the tale reveals an internal contradiction in the Greek concept of friendship, the Greek virtue of friendship – more precisely, in its philosophical concept, as it could be implemented in a philosopher’s life. Nietzsche notes that in Antiquity the feeling of friendship was the highest, more elevated than the most celebrated pride of the sages, who boasted of their independence, autonomy and self-sufficiency. Certainly, this ‘unique’ feeling seemed to be indissociable from this pride, this freedom of self-determination from which it thus stemmed. Now the tale, setting face-to-face a king and a philosopher, a Macedonian king and a Greek philosopher, tends to mark a split between this proud independence, this freedom, this self-sufficiency that claims to rise above the world, and a friendship which should agree to depend on and receive from the other. The Athenian philosopher disdains the world, refusing as a result the king’s gift (Geschenk) of a talent. ‘What!’ demanded the king. ‘Has he no friend?’ Nietzsche translates: the king meant that he certainly honoured the pride of a sage jealous of his independence and his own freedom of movement; but the sage would have honoured his humanity better had he been able to triumph over his proud self-determination, his own subjective freedom; had he been able to accept the gift and the dependency – that is, this law of the other assigned to us by friendship, a sentiment even more sublime than the freedom or self-sufficiency of a subject. The philosopher discredited himself in his ignorance of one of the two sublime sentiments, in truth ‘the more elevated’ of the two.

      A logic of the gift thus withholds friendship from its philosophical interpretation. Imparting to it a new twist, at once both gentle and violent, this logic reorientates friendship, deflecting it towards what it should have been – what it immemorially will have been. This logic calls friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymmetry or to disproportion, to the impossibility of a return to offered or received hospitality; in short, it calls friendship back to the irreducible precedence of the other. To its consideration [pré-venance, thoughtfulness of and for that which ‘comes before’]. But is there more or less freedom in accepting the gift of the other? Is this reorientation of the gift that would submit friendship to the consideration of the other something other than alienation? And is this alienation without relation to the loss of identity, of responsibility, of freedom that is also translated by ‘madness’, this living madness which reverses, perverts or converts (good) sense, makes opposites slide into each other and ‘knows’ very well, in its own way, in what sense the best friends are the best enemies? Hence the worst.

      What concept of freedom – and of equality – are we talking about? And what are the political consequences and implications, notably with regard to democracy, of such a rupture in reciprocity – indeed, of such a divorce between two experiences of freedom that pride themselves on being respectively the hyperbole of the other?

      With regard to democracy and with regard to justice? For we would be tempted to match Nietzsche’s gesture, as we have just seen it in outline, to the call he seems to be making for another justice: the one soon to be within reach of the new philosophers – the arrivants – the one already within their reach, since these arrivants, who are still to come, are already coming: ‘But what is needful is a new justice (Sondem eine neue Gerechtigkeit tut not!)’,¹⁵ just as we lack – it is the same sentence, the same need, the same exigency – ‘new philosophers’. The anchor must be raised with you, philosophers of a new world (for there is more than one [car il y en a plus d’un]), in a search for a justice that would at last break with sheer equivalence, with the equivalence of right and vengeance, of justice as principle of equivalence (right) and the law of eye for eye, an equivalence between the just, the equitable (gerecht), and the revenged (geracht) that Nietzschean genealogy has relentlessly recalled as the profound motivation of morality and of right, of which we are the heirs. What would an equality then be, what would an equity be, which would no longer calculate this equivalence? Which would, quite simply, no longer calculate at all? And would carry itself beyond proportion, beyond appropriation, thereby exceeding all reappropriation of the proper?

      This ‘disappropriation’ [dépropriation] would undoubtedly beckon to this other ‘love’ whose true name, says Nietzsche in conclusion, whose ‘just name’ is friendship (Ihr rechter Name ist Freundschaft).¹⁶ This friendship is a species of love, but of a love more loving than love. All the names would have to change for the sake of coherence. Without being able to devote to it the careful reading it deserves, let us recall that this little two-page treatise on love denounces, in sum, the right to property. This property right is the claim [revendication] of love (at least, of what is thus named). The vindictive claim of this right can be deciphered throughout all the appropriative manoeuvres of the strategy which this ‘love’ deploys. It is the appropriating drive (Trieb) par excellence. ‘Love’ wants to possess. It wants the possessing. It is the possessing – cupidity itself (Habsucht); it always hopes for new property; and even the very Christian ‘love of one’s neighbour’ – charity, perhaps – would reveal only a new lust in this fundamental drive: ‘Our love of our neighbour – is it not a lust for new possessions? (Unsere Nächstenliebe – ist sie nicht ein drang nach neuem Eigentum?)’

      This question is doubly important. In contesting the Christian revolution of love as much as the Greek philosophical concept of friendship – and just as much the norms of justice that depend on them – its target is the very value of proximity, the neighbour’s proximity as the ruse of the proper and of appropriation. The gesture confirms the warning accompanying the discourse on ‘good friendship’: not to give in to proximity or identification, to the fusion or the permutation of you and me. But, rather to place, maintain or keep an infinite distance within ‘good friendship’. The very thing that love – that which is thus named, ‘love between the sexes’, egotism itself, jealousy which tends only towards possession (Besitzen) – is incapable of doing.

      Is this to say that friendship, rightly named, will carry itself beyond Eros? Beyond Eros in general? Or beyond love between two sexes?

      Nietzsche does not unfold these questions in this form. But let us not conceal their radicality, which can become disquieting, particularly given the motive of the ‘new’ or of the ‘future’ that we perhaps too often trust as if it were univocal, simply opposed to the form of repetition and the work of the arch-ancient. For Nietzsche sees this drive of appropriation, this form always pushing for ‘new property’, at work everywhere, including where love loves in view of knowledge, of truth, of the novelty of the new, of all new reality in general: ‘Our love of our neighbour – is it not a lust for new possessions? And likewise our love of knowledge, of truth, and altogether any lust for what is new? (und uberhaupt all jener Drang nach Neuigkeiten?)’

      If ‘new’ always means, again and again, once again, anew, the appropriative drive, the repetition of the same drive to appropriate the other for oneself, the truth, being, the event, etc., what can still take place anew? Anew? What remains to come? And what will become of our just impatience to see the new coming, the new thoughts, the new thinkers, new justice, the revolution or the messianic interruption? Yet another ruse? Once again the desire of appropriation?

      Yes. Yes, perhaps.

      And you must be coherent with this response. You must acquiesce to this principle of ruin at the heart of the most utterly new. It could never be eluded or denied.

      And yet. At the heart of this acquiescence, just when a yes could be proffered to the principle of ruin, beyond knowledge and truth, precisely, an empty place would be left – left by Nietzsche as we would perhaps like to read him: a place open for that which can perhaps still take place – by chance. Favourable to friendship and like friendship, the friendship that would then deserve its just name. More precisely, favourable to the love whose just name would be friendship.

      Because the adequation between the concept, the name, and the event could never be assured. Its appropriateness [jusresse] would not be regulated by the necessity of any knowledge. Perhaps,