Derrida – The Politics of Friendship - Theory Reading Group at UNM

230 POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
philosophy's great canonical discourses on friendship, the discourse of the
very philosopher quoted by Montaigne - Aristotle - whose major features
we are questioning, the axiomatic and hierarchy-creating power diffused
by its renown. This irradiation began before Aristotle (with Plato, etc.) and
continues well beyond him, to be sure, well beyond Epicureanism and
Stoicism, beyond Cicero, certain Church Fathers, and several others. But
we thought it necessary to begin, precisely, by questioning the most
canonical of the canonical, in this place in which is concentrated, for us in
the West, the potential of maximum signification of the dominant power
in its most assured authority. Will it be possible to (re)turn or to go
elsewhere, beyond or below this potential of irradiation?
But even to pose this question, and precisely to suspend it on a 'perhaps',
we risk reaccrediting, with all its conceptual machinery, the potentiality/
act distinction, the one between dunamis and energeia. It is never far away,
in the Nicomachean Ethics, when it is a matter of distinguishing between the
'good' who, always few in number, are friends in the rigorous sense of the
term, in the proper sense, simply friends, absolutely friends (apMs phflOI),
and the others who are friends only by accident or by analogy with the first
(VIII, 6, 1157b 1-5); the same distinction is never far away when the issue
is that of distinguishing between, on the one hand, friendship par excellence,
the friendship of virtue (the prote philla of the Eudemian Ethics or the telela
phiUa of the Nicomachean Ethics) and, on the other, derived friendships,
those grounded in usefulness or pleasure. Neither is the distinction ever far
away when, having defined three forms of government or constitution
(paUte£a) , the Nicomachean Ethics sets out three corresponding types of
friendship, each of them proportional to relations of justice (VIII, 10, 1160a
31 and 13; 1161a 10), in such a way that ifman is a 'political' being made
to live in society (IX, 9, 1169b 28), and if, then, he is in need of friends,
properly political friendship is nevertheless only a species of friendship, a
derived one, the useful friendship demanded for concord, accord, consensus
(homonoia). All these divides suppose the potentiality/act distinction, the
accident/essence distinction, etc. And such distinctions would be called up
here, and therefore necessarily implied or implemented - claims Aristotle in
sum - by the correct use and understanding of the Greek word phi[{a, by
its very semantic constitution. By everything named friendship, by everything
whose 'true name is friendship', as Nietzsche said in The Gay Science
(para. 14).
Let us then suppose, concesso non dato, that one can today translate by
friendship', by FreundschaJt, by amitie, etc., these Greek words phiUa,
homonoia, and all those which, one following upon the next, are inseparable
'IN HUMAN LANGUAGE, FRATERNITY .. .' 231
frOID them. That would amount, here, to considering the possibility of this
translation ensured, and the possibility of thinking thought, qua the thought
of the same or the thought of the other, in the pathbreaking [frayage] of this
tr:msfer, train or tramway named phi/{a, FreundschaJt,friendship, amitie.
Aristotle knew that this translation poses a critical problem, already from
within the Greek language. His own language had to revert, in effect, to
the same word, phi/{a, for different and derived senses, inadequate to phiUa
prote and telda phi[{a. The entire discourse of the two Ethics on phi/{a can be
read as a discourse on language, on the word phi[{a: its uses, its contexts, its
measured equivocation, its legitimate or improper translations.
Now, even supposing, concesso non dato, that these words can be translated
with no remainder, the quesrions of responsibility remain here among us
(but then how many of us are there?). How is this responsibility to be
exercised in the best possible way? How will we know if there is phi[{a or
homonoia between us, if we are getting on well, at what moment and to
what degree? How are we to distinguish between ourselves, between each
of us who compose this as yet so undetermined 'we'?
Let us therefore suppose that you hold me responsible for what I say by
the mere fact that I am speaking, even if I am not yet assuming responsibility
for the sentences I am quoting.
Then, perhaps, you will grant me this: that as the first result of a practical
demonstration, the one that has just taken place - even before the question
of responsibility was posed, the question of 'speaking in one's own name',
countersigning such and such an affirmation, etc. - we are caught up, one
and another, in a sort of heteronomic and dissymmetrical curving of social
space - more precisely, a curving of the relation to the other: prior to all
organized socius, all po/{teia, all determined 'government', bifore all 'law'.
Prior to and before all law, in Kafka's sense of being 'before the law'.5
Let's get this right: prior to all determined law, qua natural law or positive
law, but not prior to law in general. For the heteronomic and dissymmetrical
curving of a law of originary sociability is also a law, perhaps the very
essence of law. What is unfolding itself at this instant - and we are finding
it a somewhat disturbing experience - is perhaps only the silent deployment
of that strange violence that has always insinuated itself into the origin of
the most innocent experiences of friendship or justice. We have begun to
respond. Weare already caught up, we are caught out, in a certain
responsibility, and the most ineluctable responsibility - as if it were possible
to think a responsibility without freedom. Weare invested with an
undeniable responsibility at the moment we begin to signify something.
But where does this begin? Does it ever begin? This responsibility that