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

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POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
community, solidarity or the sect - initiation or private space which
represents the very thing the friend who speaks to you as a friend of
solitude has rebelled against.
How can this be? Is it not a challenge to good sense and to sense tout
court? Is it possible?
It is perhaps impossible, as a matter of fact. Perhaps the impossible is the
only possible chance of something new, of some new philosophy of the
n~w. P~rha~s; perhaps, in truth, the perhaps still names this chance. Perhaps
~ends?Ip, If there is such a thing, must honour ifaire droit] what appears
ImpossIble here. Let us, then, underscore once again the perhaps (vielleich~
of a sentence, the one ending the second section of Beyond Good and Evil
entitled 'The free spirit' (para. 44).
'
After the 'frog perspective', with the eye of the toad - on the same side
b~t also. on the other - we have the eye of the owl, an eye open day and
rught, like a ghost in the immense Nietzschean bestiary; but here too,
above all, we have the scarecrow, the disquieting simulacrum, the opposite
of a decoy: an artifact in rags and tatters, an automaton to frighten birds _
the Vogelscheuchen that we are and should be in the world of today, if we
ar~ to save, with madness and with singularity itself, the friendship of the
solitary and the chance to come of a new philosophy. We shall focus on a
moment of this clamour - only the conclusion of this long-winded [au
long souJlle] address. It should be allowed to ring out in a loud voice in its
en~ety, and in its original language. In the light of the night, for this
solItude of which we are jealous is that of 'midday and midnight'. Before
quoting these few lines, let us recall, however, that this passage begins with
an attack on a certain concept of the free spirit, of free thOUght. Nietzsche
denounces the freethinkers, the levellers with their enslaved pens _ in the
service not of democracy, as they sometimes claim, but of 'democratic
taste' and, in quotation marks, 'modem ideas'. It is out of the question to
opp~se some non-freedom to the freedom of these free spirits (since they
are In truth slaves); only additional freedom. These philosophers of the
future (diese Philosophen der Zukunft) that Nietzsche says are coming will
be free. spirits, 'very free' spirits (freie, sehr .freie Geister). But through
al~o
this superlatIVe and this surplus of freedom, they will also be something
greater and other, something altogether other, fundamentally other
(Grundlich-Anderes). As for what will be fundamentally other, I will say that
the philosophers of the future will be at once both its figure and its
responsibility (althOUgh Nietzsche does not put it in this way). Not because
they will come, if they do, in the future, but because these philosophers of the
future already are philosophers capable of thinking the future, of carrying and
LOVING IN FRIENDSHIP: PERHAPS 37
I"'taining the future - which is to say, for the metaphysician allergic to the
I'trhaps, capable of enduring the intolerable, the undecidable a~d the
trrrifying. Such philosophers already exist, something like the MeSSIah (for
the teleiopoesis we are speaking of is a messianic structure) whom someone
addresses, here and now, to inquire when he will come. 14 We are not yet
Imong these philosophers of the future, we who are c~ing them an~
railing them the philosophers of the future, but we are m adv~ce theIr
friends and, in this gesture of the call, we establish ourselves as theIr heralds
and precursors (ihre Herolde und Vorlaufer). "
This precursivity does not stop at the premomtory SIgn. It already
t'ngages a bottomless responsibility, a debt whose sharing out [parta~e] IS
differentiated enough to warrant a prudent analysis. Nietzsche sometImes
lAyS 'I' and sometimes 'we'. The signatory of the precursory disc~urses
addressed to you is sometimes me, sometimes us - that is, a communIty of
lolitary friends, friends Jealous of solitude', jealous of their 'proper and
profound solitude of midday-midnight' who .call other frien~s t~ I~ome.
This is perhaps the 'community of those WIthOUt commuruty : .
But the declared responsibility, the Schuldigkeit thus named, IS mme, that
of the person saying I. It says, I say, I must answer at the same time before
the philosophers of the future to come (before them), before the spectre of
those who are not yet here, and before the philosophers of the future that
we (we) already are, we who are already capable of thinking the future or
the coming of philosophers of the future. A double responsibility which
doubles up again endlessly: I must answer for myself or before myself by
answering for us and before us. I/we must answer for the present we for
and before the we of the future, while presently addressing myself to you,
and inviting you to join up with this 'us' of which you are already but not
yet a member. At the end of the teleiopoetic sentence you, readers, may
have already become, nevertheless, the cosignatories of the addresses
addressed to you, providing, at least, that you have heard it, which you are
invited to do to the best of your ability - which thus remains your
absolutely and irreplaceably singular responsibility. . .
This is a double but infInite responsibility, infInitely redoubled, split m
two [de-doubUe] , shared and parcelled out; an infInitely divided responsibility,
disseminated, if you will, for one person, for only one - all alo~e
(this is the condition of responsibility) - and a bottomless double responsIbility
that implicitly describes an intertwining of tem~oral ~kstases: a
friendship to come of time with itself where we meet agam the mterlacmg
of the same and the altogether other ('Grundlich-Anderes') which orientates
us in this labyrinth. The to-come precedes the present, the self-presentation