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

288 POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
ourselves'. Here, this should be exactly the opposite, since it is a question
of the friend, of the supennan whose present friendship urges the arrival.
Not the past friend, but the friend to come. Now what is coming is still
spectral, and it must be loved as such. As if there were never anything but
spectres, on both sides of all opposition, on both sides of the present, in the
past and in the future. All phenomena of friendship, all things and all beings
to be loved, belong to spectrality. 'It is necessary to love' means: the
spectres, they are to be loved; the spectre must be respected (we know that
Mary Shelley brought our attention to the anagram that makes the spectre
in respect become visible again). And here we have the sentence addressed
by Zarathustra to his brother. Here is what the song 'Of Love of One's
Neighbour' promises him: the friend to come, the arrivant who comes from
afar, the one who must be loved in remoteness and from afar, the supennan
- and it is a spectre:
Higher than love of one's neighbour stands love of the most distant man and of
the man of the future; higher still than love of man I account love of causes and
of phantoms (die Liebe zu Sachen und Gespenstern).
This phantom that runs along behind you, my brother, is fairer than you; why
do you not give it your flesh and bones? But you are afraid and you run to your
neighbour. (p. 87)
A spectral distance would thus assign its condition to memory as well as to
the future as such. The as such itself is affected with spectrality; hence is it
no longer or not yet exactly what it is. The disjunction of spectral distance
would, by this very fact, mark both the past and the future with a nonreappropriable
alterity.23
Thus, at least, spoke Zarathustra. We have refrained from substituting
Nietzsche's name for his, as if, from one ghost to another, it never came
down to the same one. Things are already unattackable and inappropriable
enough as they are for each ghost. Neither should one rush. to consider a
single one of Zarathustra's sentences as Gospel. Having commanded them
to be capable of facing the enemy, of respecting, fearing, honouring him;
having recalled that a humanity in default of an end also defaults itself - is
itself lacking in humanity - Zarathustra demands of his disciples that they
leave him: repudiate me, be ashamed of the one who 'perhaps has deceived
you'. 'For the man of knowledge must not only love his friends: he must
also be able to hate his enemies!' This is the immense song 'Of the
Bestowing Virtue', in whose end, in a neo-evangelical scene, Zarathustra
addresses his brothers to promise his return. Then, after the separation, after
'FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY' 289
the repudiation, another love - friendship itself - will be possible.
Zarathustra swears, invites, bids, demands the oath:
Now I bid you (Nun heisse ich euch) lose me and fmd yourselves, and only when
you have all denied me will I return to you.
Truly, with other eyes, my brothers, I shall then seek my lost ones; with
another love I shall then love you.
And once more you shall have become my friends and children of one hope:
and then I will be with you a third time, that I may celebrate the great noontide
with you ....
'All gods are dead: now we want the Superman to live' - let this be our last will,
one day, at the great noontide!
This is only the end of Part One. To relaunch it, it will become the
epigraph of Part Two. The entire path of this abyssal altercation with
Christian fraternity had begun, as we will recall, with the evocation of the
hermit. As Zarathustra is also addressing another brother to come, but one
who is already listening to him, there would be - among all the tasks that
thus assign themselves to us but which, alas, we have to give up pursuing -
an ancient and new history to relate and to make, from this point of view,
of Christian fraternity: not only its theme, its concept and its figures but its
orders, fraternities as institutions (an analogous and equally urgent investigation
would deal with the figure of the brother in Arabo-Islarnic culture
- and with the 'Muslim brothers'). Faced with this task, our shortcoming
has no avowable justification here. Let it nevertheless be clear that we
believe in the gravity of the obligation which the limits of this work oblige
us to shirk. We have insisted sufficiently on the indefinite recoils of the
discourse and strategy of Zarathustra in order not to be convinced in
advance that the history of the brother in the Bible and in the Koran, as is
the case in the history of orders called 'fraternities', contains in itself, here
or there, in one fold or recoil or another, reason enough for fmding
ourselves beside Zarathustra or his disciples rather than in a posture of
confrontation.
Let us hold at least to this evidence: these songs of Zarathustra are also
songs of mourning. He is taking leave, he asks to be repudiated, he will
return, and the returning ghost who promises his brothers that they will
then be his brothers or friends is indeed a testament, a 'this is my body'
offered again to them.
As if there were no interminable mourning other than the mourning of
the brother, and as if the friendship we have been speaking about would