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

12 POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
How can you pass from maternal enjoyment to death? This passage is
not visible in the immediacy of the text. Naming, cetainly, the enjoyment
of maternal love in so far as it renounces reciprocity, the Nicomachean Ethics
associates it neither with surviving nor with dying. The Eudemian Ethics
speaks of the renunciation of the mother, in her very love, but without
naming enjoyment and in order immediately to go on [enchafner] to death.
We have just recalled this logical chain. To want to be known, to refer to
self in view of self, to receive the good rather than to do it or to give it -
this is an altogether different thing from knowing. Knowing knows in
order to do and to love, for love and in view of doing and loving (to de
gin/1skein tou poiein kai tou philefn eneka), as Aristode then says, concluding:
'This is why we praise those who continue to love their deceased, for they
know but are not known' (dio kai tous emmenontas to philefn pros tous
tethneotas epainoumen, gin5skousi gar, all' ou gindskontai 1 ,). Friendship for
the deceased thus carries this phiUa to the limit of its possibility. But at the
same time, it uncovers the ultimate spring of this possibility: I could not
love friendship without projecting its impetus towards the horizon of this
death. The horizon is the limit and the absence of limit, the loss of the
horizon on the horizon, the ahorizontality of the horizon, the limit as
absence of limit. I could not love friendship without engaging myself,
without feeling myself in advance engaged to love the other beyond death.
Therefore, beyond life. I feel myself - and in advance, before any contract
_ bome to love the dead other. I feel myself thus (borne to) love; it is thus
that I feel myself (loving).
Autology provides food for thought, as always: I feel myself loving,
borne to love the deceased, this beloved or this lovable being of whom it
has already been said that he was not necessarily alive, and that therefore he
was bearing death in his being-loved, smack against his being-lovable, in
the range [portee] of the reference to his very being-loved. Let us recall it,
and let us do so in the words of Aristode. He explains to us why one can
rejoice and why there is a place for rejoicing in loving (dio to philefn
kha{rein), but one could never rejoice - or at the very least, we would say,
not essentially, not intrinsically - in being loved (al/' ou to phileisthai est{n).
Enjoyment, the self-rejoicing, is immanent not to the beloved but to the
loving, to its act, to its proper energeia. 18 The criterion of this distinction
follows an apparendy invisible line. It passes between the living and the
dead, the animate and the inanimate, the psychic and the a-psychic. A
question of respiration or inspiration: loving belongs only to a being gifted
with life or with breath (en empsuko). Being loved, on the other hand,
always remains possible on the side of the inanimate (en apsukhO), where a
OLIGARCHIES: NAMING, ENUMERATING, COUNTING 13
,,,withe may already have expired. 'One also loves inanimate beings' (phi/eitai
"., Itai ta apsukha). 19
(We are striving to speak here in the logic of Aristode's two Ethics, doing
.vrrything that seems possible to respect the conceptual veins of his
~rltumentation. The reader who is familiar with Aristode may find that the
lillie has changed, however, along with the pathos and the connotations;
he may suspect some slow, discreet or secret drift. Let us ask him - let us
I.k ourselves - what the law of this drift is and, more precisely, if there is
unt', and if it be pure, the purely conceptual, logical or properly philosophkill
law of order. A law which would not only be of a psychological,
rhetorical or poetic order. What is taking place here? And what if what is
'aking place were taking place precisely between the two orders that we
hIve just distinguished, at their very juncture? Let us not forget that in the
tllle of psychology, the question of the psukhe, or of animate life, is at the
heOirt of all philosophical reflection on phi/fa. For Aristode, neither rhetoric
11m poetics could ever be excluded from this reflection; and poets are
quoted, more than once called up to testify, even asjudges of truth.)
If phiUa lives, and if it lives at the extreme limit of its possibility, it
therefore lives, it stirs, it becomes psychic from within this resource of
lurvival. This phiUa, this psukhe between friends, sur-vives. It cannot survive
It.elf as act, but it can survive its object, it can love the inanimate.
(:ollsequendy it springs forward, from the threshold of this act, towards the
possibility that the beloved might be dead. There is a first and irreducible
dllsymmetry here. But this same dissymmetry separates itself, after a fashion,
In an unpresentable topology; it folds, turns inside out and doubles itself at
thr same time in the hypothesis of shared friendship, the friendship tranquilly
described as reciprocal. I do not survive the friend, I cannot and must not
lurvive him, except to the extent to which he already bears my death and
Inherits it as the last survivor. He bears my own death and, in a certain way,
hr is the only one to bear it - this proper death of myself" thus expropriated
In OIdvance.
(I say that using the masculine gender {the [male] friend, he, and so
forth} - not in the narcissistic or fraternal violence of a distraction, but by
wily of announcing a question awaiting us, precisely the question of the
bruther, in the canonical- that is, androcentric - structure of friendship.)
In any case, phiUa begins with the possibility of sUrvlval. Surviving - that
II the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.
for one does not survive without mourning. No one alive can get the