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

76 POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
by means of a sort of self-immunity from which no region of being, phUsis
or history would be exempt. We could, then, imagine a time, this particular
time - in any case we would not have any other at our disposal - but we
would hesitate to say 'this particular time', for its presence, here and now,
and its indivisible singularity, would give rise to doubt. We would want to
reappropriate for ourselves, here and now, even this hesitation, even the
virtualizing, suspenseful abeyance of this epoch, in order to do it in, to
open it in a single stroke on to a time that .would be ours, and only ours:
the contemporary, should such a thing ever present itsel£ But we would not
dare to give it a name. For fear of virtualizing even more - both our desires
and our events - precisely on account of this abeyance. Nothing there
could any longer be recognized, neither a moment nor a state, not even a
transition. This would be an unprecedented time; a time which, reserving
itself in the unique, would then remain without relation to any other,
without attraction or repulsion, nor living analogy. Without even this
friendship for itself, nor this enmity: without the love or the hate that
would make this time appear as such. But absolutely without indifference.
A time said to be contemporary that would be anything but contemporary
- anything, except proper to its own time. It would resemble nothing, nor
would it gather itself up in anything, lending itself to any possible reflection.
It would no longer relate to itsel£ There would, however, be absolutely no
indifference; it would not be - in other words, it would not be present -
either with the other or with itself. Should it present itself, should it with
some word, say '1', its speech could only be that of a madman; and if it
described itself as living, this would again be - and more probably than ever
- a sign of madness.
One would then have the time of a world without friends, the time of a
world without enemies. The imminence of a self-destruction by the infinite
development of a madness of self-immunity. And anyone who would say
'0 my friends, there are no friends', and again, or again, '0 enemies, there
is no enemy', would convince us, following a cool, directly logical analysis
of his statements, that he does not yet have a friend, but already no longer
has an enemy. Or conversely, at the present time. This would be, perhaps,
as if someone had lost the enemy, keeping him only in memory, the
shadow of an ageless ghost, but still without having found friendship, or
the friend. Or a name for either.
Ifwe were not wary, in determining them too quickly, about precipitating
these things towards an excessively established reality, we might propose
a gross example, among an infinity of others, simply to set a heading: since
what a naive scansion dates from the 'fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall', or from the
THE PHANTOM FRIEND RETURNING 77
• end-of-communism' , the 'parliamentary-democracies-of-the-capitalist­
Western-world' would find themselves without a principal enemy. The
effects of this destructuration would be countless: the 'subject' in question
would be looking for new reconstitutive enmities; it would multiply 'little
wars' between nation-states; it would sustain at any price so-called ethnic
or genocidal struggles; it would seek to pose itself, to find repose, through
opposing still identifiable adversaries - China, Islam? Enemies without
which, as Schmitt would have said - and this is our subject - it would lose
its political being; it would purely and simply depoliticize itself [se
dq,olitiserait].
These are questions we therefore murmur to ourselves - the whisper of
the aforementioned fiction, just for a start; without an enemy, and therefore
without friends, where does one then find oneself, qua a self? [ou se trouver,
ou se trouver soi-meme]? With whom? Whose contemporary? Who is the
contemporary? When and where would we be, ourselves, we, in order to
say, as in Nietzsche's unbelievable teleiopoesis, 'we' and 'you'? Let us call
these questions fictive questions, to recall an evidence of common sense: I
can address them - these anguished, but abstract and fleshless questions -
only to an addressee; I can only throw them out towards a reader, whoever
he may be; I can only destine them with the precipitative supposition of a
we that, by definition and by destination, has not yet arrived to itself Not
before, at the earliest, the end and the arrival of this sentence whose very
logic and grammar are improbable. For the 'I' that feigns to address these
fictive questions finds itself comprised and determined in advance by the
fact that it belongs to the most suspended 'we' of this supposed contemporaneity.
It is the arrow of this teleiopoesis that we have been following,
waiting for, preceding for such a long time - the long time of a time that
does not belong to time. A time out of joint.
Let us start again. We had just attempted, in the precedmg chapter, a
first interpretation. One among an infinite number of other possible ones,
as Nietzsche himself said one day, an interpretation of one of his sayings,
the exegesis of a fiction or an apostrophe, in memory of Montaigne, who
said it himself as the heir of Aristotle and Cicero, in the great unending
maieutic tradition of Lysis (e peri phiUas, maieutikos).
Let us not forget that Lysis begins with the scene of a proper name
which cannot at first be pronounced: who is the loved one? Will his name
be cited? Will he be called by his name for the first time? Everything in the
political question of friendship seems to be suspended on the secret of a
name. Will this name be published? Will tongues be untied, and will the
name be delivered over to public space? Will a public space be opened up?