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

60 PO'tITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
himself up as a fool, the sage when he intends to give himself up for a fool,
when he agrees to present himself as that which he is not. I prefer to keep,
in its literality and playfulness, the reference to the present, the gift, to
giving oneself up as. For the simulacrum of this sage knows how to offer
himself, he makes a gift, he makes himself into a gift, inspired by a generous
friendship. He thereby gives the good to avoid doing evil to his Umgebung:
his entourage, milieu, relatives. And he feigns, lies, disguises or masks
himself, out of friendship for mankind, out of MenschetifTeundlichkeit:
philanthropy once again, humanity, sociability. Here is the English translation
which we will modify or compare with the words of the original
version only when we consider it especially indispensable:
Paragraph 246. The wise man pretending to be afool. The WIse man's plulanthropy
(Die Menschenfreundlichkeit) sometunes leads hun to pose as excited, angry,
delighted (sich emgt, erzumt, eifreut zu stellen), so that the coldness and
reflectIveness of ius true nature (of hIS true essence, seines wahren Wesens) shall
not harm those around him. (original emphasis)
Lie, mask, dissimulation, the simulacrum bestows. It also provokes vertigo:
the sage, for friendship's sake - this is what makes him a sage - takes on the
disguise of the fool, and, for friendship's sake, disguises his friendship as
enmity. But what is he hiding? His enmity, for the coldness and lucidity of
his true nature are to be feared only where they may hurt and reveal some
aggressivity. In sum, the sage presents himself as an enemy in order to
conceal his enmity. He shows his hostility so as not to hurt with his
wickedness. And why does he take such pains? Out of friendship for
mankind, philanthropic sociability. His pose (sich stellen) consists - in the
sheer difference between hot and cold, exalted anger and icy lucidity - in
feigning to be predsely what he is, in telling the truth to conceal the truth and
especially to neutralize its deadly effect, to protect others from it. He loves
them enough not to want to do them all the evil he wants for them. He loves them
too much for that.
And what if tomorrow a new political wisdom were to let itself be
inspired by this lie's wisdom, by this manner of knowing how to lie,
dissimulate or divert wicked lucidity? What if it demanded that we know,
and know how to dissimulate, the principles and forces of social unbinding
[deliaison], all the menacing disjunctions? To dissimulate them in order to
preserve the social bond and the Menschenfreundlichkeit? A new political
wisdom - human, humanistic, anthropological, of course? A new Menschenfreundlichkeit
pessimistic, sceptical, hopeless, incredulous?
THIS MAD 'TRUTH': THE JUST NAME OF FRIENDSHIP 61
A new virtue, from that point on?
The Nietzschean thought of virtue will not be simplified here. So very
many apparently heterogeneous propositions would have to be not only
reread but harmonized. The immense but rigorously coherent medley of
Zarathustra's addresses to his 'brothers' would also - and this would be an
awesome and hitherto unaccomplished feat - have to be taken into account.
Addresses to his friends who are also brothers. This consequence, in its
shimmering mobility, its untenable instability, appears no less rigorous even
though it is not systematic: not philosophical, moral, or theological. Its
expository mode can never be reduced to what it nevertheless also is: the
discipline of a psychology, a prophecy, a poetics. Our hypothesis is that the
'genre', the 'mode', the 'rhetoric', the 'poetics', and the 'logic' to which
Zarathustra's songs belong - 'Of the friend', 'Of the bestowing virtue', 'Of
the virtuous', 'Of the belittling virtue' (examples of what interests us here)
- could be determined, following old or new categories, only from the
place of the very thing that is said there, in this sped.fic place, about friendship
and virtue, fraternity, and the saying of what is said there, in that way. We·
shall consider these passages when the time comes.
This said and this saying call for a new type of address. They claim as
much, in any case, teleiopoetically. To take saying and the virtue of
speaking about virtue seriously is to acknowledge the address of a vocation:
the brothers (past, present or to come) for whom Zarathustra destines such a
harangue on friendship and on virtue, an ever-evil virtue. The brothers?
Why the brothers? The addressees, as always, lay down the law of genre.
We must meditate upon this: the addressees are brothers, and their coming
virtue remains virile. The Gay Sdence (para. 169) says that declared enemies
are indispensable for men who must 'rise to the level of their own virtue,
virility (Mannlichkeit), and cheerfulness'.
We shall return to this later, then. But to confine ourselves here to the
barest schema, let us note that the motive of virtue is never discredited -
no more so than the word virtue, in its Greek or Judaeo-Christian cultural
context. Virtue is regularly reaffirmed by Nietzsche according to a logic or
a rhetoric that can be interpreted in at least three ways (at least three when
the question concerns the author of 'Our new "infinite" which never
ceased to designate in this way a world that had become infinite again since
opening for us onto an "infinity ofinterpretations."'lO):
1. the deliberate perversion of the heritage - the opposite meaning
under the same word;