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

302 POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
of which Blanchot has complained, so often, so profoundly, not that it is
fatal but that it remains impossible? Like friendship, perhaps: 'I believe
I am remaining faithful, however awkwardly, to the intellectual friendship
that his death, so painful for me, today allows me to declare to him, as I
recall the words attributed by Diogenes Laertes to Aristotle: "Oh my
friends, there is no friend.'" This is shown (performatively), by the fact,
attested here, that this friendship could not have been declared during the
lifetime of the friend. It is death that 'today allows me' to 'declare' this
'intellectual friendship', 'as .. .'. May thanks be given to death. It is thanks
to death that friendship can be declared. Never before, never otherwise.
And never if not in recalling (while thanks to death, the friend recalls that
there are no friends). And when friendship is declared during the lifetime
of friends, it avows, fundamentally, the same thing: it avows the death
thanks to which the chance to declare itself comes at last, never failing to
come.
Without seeking to conceal it, it will have been undersood that I wish
to speak here of those men and women to whom a bond of friendship
unites me - that is, I also want to speak to them. If only through the rare
friendship I am naming, which always occasions in me a surge of admiration
and gratitude. To my knowledge, among the aforementioned, those who
cite Aristotle's quasi-citation, always in the canonical version, there is,
besides Maurice Blanchot, Michel Deguy. In a more Roman tradition (a
Latin quotation) whose path he has not indicated to me, Deguy concentrates
on the Aristotelian reminder, against Plato, of the singularity of this,
of this friend. Let us cease speaking of friendship, of the ddos of friendship;
let us speak of friends. This is the enormous vein, the inexhaustible tapos of
the quarrel Aristotle believed it was necessary to pick with Plato's ghost.
Now here we have what is happening to us today with the ruin which
affects us and which we have adopted as our theme: this collapse of the
friendship concept will perhaps be a chance, but, along with Friendship,
the collapse carries off the Friend too, and there is nothing fortuitous in the
fact that the sudden burst of this chance at the heart of the ruin is still
linked, in what in our time is most untimely, to literature, to the 'literary
community' , of which The Unavowable Community also speaks. (Is not
literature today, in the saturation of a geopolitical process of a becomingworldwide
[mondialitlJ, the very thing which remains intolerable to the
intolerance of the theological-political systems for which, the idea of
democracy having no unconditional virtue, no speech can elude the space
of theological-political authority? Absolute theologization qua absolute
'FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY' 303
politicization?) For it is above all a question of poetry and literature in the
pages Deguy devotes to '0 amici mei', and the word 'literature' is the only
word, along with 'friendship', or with the singularity of 'this one', that he
wishes to underscore:
Oamicimei
If a certain Latin tradition is to be believed on this subject - 0 Amid mei, sicut
Aristoteles dicere solitus est, nul/us est amicus! - it is under the heading of friendship
that Aristotle undertook to ruin the capital letters of Platonism, and called to the
witness stand the ousia prr1tt. this man. 0 my friends, there is no Friend. 11
Under the sign of the capital letter in ruins, where Friendship should give
way to friends who henceforth no longer answer the call to the witness
stand, a narrative could follow (for it would be a question of narrative,
signed by someone who presents himself, with all due irony, as a reader for
'a major publisher', the same one, as a matter of fact, which houses the
great work ofBataille and Blanchot). The narrative would be prepared only
'to tell stories of the monuments and ruins offriendship'. Such a hypothesis
is handled, poetically and philosophically, through a number of themes
which have appeared to us, up until now, to embody the enigma: sexual
difference, misogyny and the monastic order of 'brothers' (,What is thought
oflove can be said in favour of friendship, the alibi allows one to speak of
the amiable. There are two conditions conducive to the firing of the spirit:
that of the "Muse", prosopeia of eros, and now "libido", and sexual
difference forces poetry to cry out its adieu: "A single being is absent and
everything comes alive ... " . The second is the womanless condition,
outside of difference, and this is the monastic flame-up of the spirit,
"philosophy", which sometimes takes flight from out of a little misogyny
(which can be misandry in the community of women)'), the 'free and
dissymmetrical relationship' of the 'most generous', again from out of a
'dying in common' (' ... singing over dying together'), and lastly, above all,
the war of friendship between family and literature:
Most men will have existed only through and for their families; when men live
and die in being loved, commented on, at times a little deplored. Among the
despairing attempts to exist beyond the family: writing, or . . . loving; which
carries off, alters, adulters. Of the other, an other, truly other, ravishes: it is a
god. And see how, as soon as they are tom away from the family by love, they
found a f.unily. Unless they die in loving, loving to die, Tristan and Juliet, this is
the choice left them by literature.