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

80 POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
the end of the last century, set out to agitate all the atoms - conceptual
ones or not, the more or less semantic elements - of this unclosed
ensemble? Who, if not Nietzsche, set out to overtum, to contest, even
their elementary identity, to dissolve what is irreducible to analysis in them,
to show the ineluctable necessity of this perversion which made opposites
pass into one another: the friend into the enemy, the strong into the weak,
the hegemonic into the oppressed, and so forth? And who brought it off,
then, in an ensemble (or 'field', but one henceforth without an assignable
limit, without assured and reassuring ground, but all the more finite for this
very fact) - perhaps in a world, but in a world which suddenly no longer
holds together, which has split asunder, no longer closes, is no longer within
it, and appears to be delivered over to what resembles a chaotic madness,
to disorder and randomness?
Certainly this mutation does not belong only to the order of discourse
or to that of the text, in the narrow, ordinary and outdated sense of these
terms. It is not only philosophical, speculative or theoretical. Multiple,
expandable and protean as it may be, the corpus of a singular individual
named 'Nietzsche' could not be its sole witness, even less contain it. As is
the case in any mutation, this one is never exempt from repetition, but
according to us, it would have affected the unity of this field, its closure as
well as all the organizing concepts of something like a political community.
Although this affirmation does not rely on any assured contemporaneity,
we belong (this is what we take the risk of saying here) to the time of this
mutation, which is precisely a harrowing tremor in the structure or the
experience of belonging. Therefore of property. Of communal belonging
and sharing: religion, family, ethnic groups, nations, homeland, country,
state, even humanity, love and friendship, lovence, be they public or
private. We belong to this tremor, if that is possible; we tremble within it.
It runs through us, and stops us dead in our tracks. We belong to it without
belonging to it. Within it we hear the resonant echo of all the great
discourses (we have already named those of Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy,
for example, but there are others, still so many others, far removed and
quite close to us) where they assume the risk and the responsibility, but also
where they give themselves over to the necessity of thinking and formalizing,
so to speak, absolute dislocation, borderless disjoining; when these thinkers
point to these obscure plights, sometimes according to the time without
duration of a thunderbolt, sometimes following the regular revolutions of a
watchtower, always emitting mad and impossible pleas, almost speechless
warnings, words that consume themselves in a dark light, such as these
typical and recurrent syntagms: 'relation without relation', community
THE PHANTOM FRIEND RETURNING 81
without community {'the community of those without community'},
'inoperative' community, 'unavowable' communism or community, and
all the 'X without X' whose list is, by definition, endless, finite in its
infinitude. Yes, these warnings tum endlessly. Yes, like searchlights without
a coast, they sweep across the dark sky, shut down or disappear at regular
intervals and harbour the invisible in their very light. We no longer even
know against what dangers or abysses we are forewarned. We avoid one,
only to be thrown into one of the others. We no longer even know
whether these watchmen are guiding us towards another destination, nor
even if a destination remains promised or determined.
We wish only to think that we are on the track of an impossible
axiomatic which remains to be thought. Now, if this axiomatic withdraws,
from instant to instant, from one ray of the searchlight to another, from
one lighthouse to the next (for there are numerous lighthouses, and where
there is no longer any home these are no longer homes, and this is what is
taking place: there are no longer any homes here), this is because darkness
is falling on the value of value, and hence on the very desire for an
axiomatic, a consistent, granted or presupposed system of values.
Now, what would a 'history', a science, or a historical action purporting
to be resolutely and ingeniously extradiscursive or extratextual aaually do?
What would a political history or philosophy, at last realistic, in truth do, if
they did not assume - so as to be confronted by and to account for the
extreme formalization, the new aporias, the semantic inconstancy - all the
disquieting conversions that we have just seen operating in these signals?
What else could they do without attempting to read all the apparendy
contradictory possibles ('relation without relation', 'community without
community', etc.) that these 'sophisticated discourses' impose on our
memory? Let us answer: they could do very little, almost nothing. They
would miss the hardest, the most resistant, the most irreducible, the
othermost of the 'thing itself. Such a political history or philosophy would
deck itself out in 'realism' just in time to fill short of the thing - and to
repeat, repeat and repeat again, with neither consciousness nor memory of
its compulsive droning.
For in the end, what does the fact that we may henceforth speak of and
with these signals say about what is taking place in the world? The fact that
we must speak in this way? The fact that the convincmg, rigorous,
ineluctable voice of necessity - its most responsible voice, too - resounds
in just this way? For example, what has become of the real structure of the
political - that of political forces and domination, the relations of strength
and weakness, the 'social bond', the marks and the discourse that give it