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

306 POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
detennination. If one wishes to retranslate this pledge into a hypothesis or
a question, it would, then, perhaps - by way of a temporary conclusion -
take the following form: is it possible to think and to implement democracy,
that which would keep the old name 'democracy', while uprooting from it
all these figures of friendship (philosophical and religious) which prescribe
fraternity: the family and the androcentric ethnic group? Is it possible, in
assuming a certain faithful memory of democratic reason and reason tout
court - I would even say, the Enlightenment of a certain AuJkliirung (thus
leaving open the abyss which is again opening today under these words) -
not to found, where it is not longer a matter of founding, but to open out
to the future, or rather, to the 'come', ofa certain democracy?
For democracy remains to come; this is its essence in so far as it remains:
not only will it remain indefinitely perfectible, hence always insufficient
and future, but, belonging to the time of the promise, it will always remain,
in each of its future times, to come: even when there is democracy, it
never exists, it is never present, it remains the theme of a non-presentable
concept. Is it possible to open up to the 'come' of a certain democracy
which is no longer an insult to the friendship we have striven to think
beyond the homo-fraternal and phallogocentric schema?
When will we be ready for an experience of freedom and equality that is
capable of respectfully experiencing that friendship, which would at last be
just, just beyond the law, and measured up against its measurelessness?
o my democratic friends ...
Notes
1. From one ofFerenczi's letters to Freud; see below, p. 280
2. Book Four, para. 279, trans. W. Kaufinann, New York, Vintage 1974,
pp. 225-226.
3. [See the epigraph to Derrida's Of Grammatology: the future is 'that which breaks
absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of
monstrosity': trans. Gayatri Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press 1976, p. 5. - Trans.]
4. Anthropology .from a Pragmatic Point of View, [trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell,
Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press 1978], p. 38.
5. See above, ch. 9, pp. 257-8.
6. 'esti gar 0 pMos alios autos', Nicomachean Etlzics, IX, 4, 1166a 32. Aristode posits
here that man, with his friend, is in a relation similar to the one he has to hirnsel£ He
then defers the question of whether there can be friendship between a man and himself,
only to return to it further on, answering in the affirmative. It is in terms of this
,
'FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY' 307
friendship for self that friendship can extend to other men. The best I can wish for my
best friend is what I wish for myselfin the highest degree (1168b 5).
7. Montaigne, Essays, p. 212.
8. 'Mein Bruder, wenn du eine Tugend hast, und es deine Tugend ist, so hast du sie mit
niemandemgemeinsam' [trans. R. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics 1961].
9. "Einer ist immer zu viel U1ll mich" - also denkt der Einsiedler. "Immer einmal eins -
das gibt atif die Dauer zwei!" . .
Id, und Midi sind immer su eifrig im Gesprache: wie ware es auzuhalten, ulfnn es mdlt emen
Freund gabe? .
"Immer ist fur den Einsiedler der Freund der Dritte: der Dritte ist der Kork, der verlundert,
daft das Gesprach der Zweie in die Tiife sinkt"', Vom Freunde, in Also spradl ZaratllUstra
[trans. R. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin 1961], p. 82. .
10. And even of sacrificial 'camo-phallogocentrism'. See Points de suspension, Galilee
1992, p.294 [Points . .. : Interviews 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy
Kamufand others, Stanford University Press 1995], pp. 280-81.
11. Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 2, 1155a 25.
12. Ibid., 10, 1160b 18-20.
13. Eudemian Ethics, VII, 9, 1241b 30.
14. Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 15, 1162b 20; Eudemian Ethics, VII, 10, 1242b 30.
15. The brother's name or the name ofbrother: Montaigne again, on his friendship
with La Boetie: 'The name of brother is truly a fair one and full oflove: that is why La
Boetie and I made a brotherhood of our alliance' p. 208).
16. Bifore the LAw.
17. Budapest, 26 December 1912, in TIle Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor
Ferenczi, vol. 1, 1908-14 [trans. Peter T. Hoffer, The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA and London 1993], pp. 449-51.
18. On all these problems, and again on the ethico-political question of the woman/
wife, the sister, and the brother in Hegel, I refer the reader to Glas, Galilee 1974 [trans.
John P. Leavey Jr and Richard Rand, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska
Press 1986]. .
19. TIle Gospel According to Matthew, V, 43-8 [trans. Members of the Catholic
Biblical Association of America, from TIle New American Bible, World Publishing 1972].
This is evidendy the passage to which Schmitt refers (see above, ch. 4, pp. 88-9).
20. TIlUs Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 87-8. .
21. 'You want to be paid as well, you the virtuous! Do you want reward for vJrtue
and heaven for earth and eternity for your today?', ibid. 'Of the Virtuous', p. 117. The
reference is undoubtedly, among many other possibilities, to the Gospel according to
Matthew, cited above. But the logic of wages is everywhere in the 90spels.
22. Chapter 4.
23. In a recent and beautiful essay, Alexander Garcia Diittrnann says of this passage
and of 'Star Friendships' that it is a question of an 'originary alter-ation' qua a nondialectizable,
non-relevable, un-sublatable distancing. See 'What is called Love in all the
Languages and Silences of the World: Nietzsche, Genealogy, Contingency', in Imago,
Fall 1993, p. 314.
24. Montaigne, 'On Friendship, p. 220.
25. Ibid., pp. 206-7.
26. L'Ami/ii, Gallimard 1971, pp. 328-9. Emphasis added.