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

294 POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
friend? Who is it? Who is he? Who is she? Who, from the moment when,
as we shall see, all the categories and all the axioms which have constituted
the concept of friendship in its history have let themselves be threatened
with ruin: the subject, the person, the ego, presence, the family and
familiarity, affinity, suitability (oikeiotes) or proximity, hence a certain truth
and a certain memory, the parent, the citizen and politics (pol{tes and
polite{a), man himself - and, of course, the brother who capitalize.
everything?
The stake of this question is, of course, also political. The political
belongs to this series, even if it is sometimes placed in the position of the
series' transcendental. Is it possible, without setting off loud protests on the
part of militants of an edifying or dogmatic humanism, to think and to live
the gentle rigour of friendship, the law of friendship qua the experience of
a certain ahumanity, in absolute separation, beyond or below the commerce
of gods and men? And what politics could still be founded on this friendship
which exceeds the measure of man, without becoming a theologem?
Would it still be a politics?
What happens politically when the 'Who' of friendship then distances
itself from all these determinations? In its 'infinite imminence' -let us listen
to Blanchot -the 'who' exceeds even the interest in knowledge, all forms
of knowledge, truth, proximity, and even as &r as life itself, and the
memory oflife. It is not yet an identifiable, public or private T. Above all,
as we are going to hear, it is some 'one' to whom one speaks (if only to tell
him or her that there is no friend), but of whom one does not speak. This,
no doubt, is why Blanchot must prefer the vocative and canonical version
to the recoil version:
We have to renounce knowing those to whom we are bound by something
essential; I want to say, we should welcome them in the relation to the unknown
in which they welcome us, us too, in our remoteness. Friendship, this relation
without dependence, without episode, into which, however, the utter simplicity
of life enters, in1.plies the recognition of a common strangeness which does not
allow us to speak of our friends, but only to speak to them, not to make of them a
theme of conversations (or articles), but the movement of understanding in
which, speaking to us, they reserve, even in the greatest familiarity, an inftnite
distance, this fundamental separation from out of which that which separates
becomes relation. Here, discretion is not in the simple refusal to repon
conftdences (how gross that would be, even to think of), but it is the interval,
the pure interval which, from me to this other who is a friend, measures
everything there is between us, the interruption of being which never authorizes
me to have him at my disposition, nor my knowledge of hin1. (if only to praise
'FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY' 295
him) and which, far from curtailing all communication, relates us one to the
other in the difference and sometimes in the silence of speech. 26
Consequently, if the testament or the epitaph remains the place of a De
Amidtia for our time, all the signs of orison find themselves - if not negated
or inversed, then at least suspended in a non-negative neutrality. Such a
neutrality calls into question not only our memory of the friend, our
thought of fidelity, but our memory of what 'friendship' has always meant.
And yet we do sense that this discreet violence accomplishes an injunction
which was already working away at the legacy of this tradition, and was
being demanded from within our very memory. On the death of the
friend, the 'measurelessness of the movement of dying', the 'event' of death
reveals and effaces at the same time this 'truth' of friendship, if only the
truth of the far-off places of which Zarathustra spoke. Oblivion is necessary:
. .. not the deepening of the separation, but its efIacement, not an enlarging of
the caesura, but its levelling, and the dissipation of this void between us where
once developed the frankness of a relation without history. In such a way that at
the present time that which was close to us has not only ceased its approach, but
has 'lost even the truth of extreme remoteness. Weare able, in a word, to
remember. But thought knows that one does not remember: without memory,
without thought, it already struggles in the invisible where all falls back into
oblivion. This is the place of profound pain. It must accompany friendship into
oblivion. (p. 329)
Oblivion must [Faut I'oub',]. Friendship without memory itself, by fidelity,
by the gentleness and rigour of fidelity, bondless friendship, out of
friendship, out of friendship for the solitary one on the part of the solitary.
Nietzsche already demanded this 'community without community', this
bondless bond. And death is the supreme ordeal of this unbinding without
which no friendship has ever seen the light of day. The book has as its
epigraph these words of Georges Bataille:
... friends to the point of this state of profound friendship in which a forsaken
man, forsaken by all his friends, meets in life he who will accompany him
beyond life, himself lifeless, capable offree friendship, detached from all bonds.
The moment when the hyperbole seems to engage with the greatest risk,
with respect to the inherited concept of friendship and all the politics that
have ever spun out of it (Graeco-democratic or Christiano-revolutionary)
is when the 'without sharing' and the 'without reciprocity' come to sign