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

106 POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
through the abstract and potentially indifferent thought of number and
equality. This thought certainly can impose homogenizing calculability
while exalting land and blood, and the risk is as terrifying as it is inevitable
- it is the risk today, more than ever. But it perhaps also keeps the power
of universalizing, beyond the State and the nation, the account taken of
anonymous and irreducible singularities, infinitely different and thereby
indifferent to particular difference, to the raging quest for identity corrupting
the most indestructible desires of the idiom.
But we have undoubtedly just given in to precipitation. We will now
have to decelerate slightly, and again take up a patient reading of Schmitt.
We were drawn into this detour - as the reader will perhaps recall - by the
highly elliptical justification that Schmitt gives in a few lines to the choice
of his words, sometimes to his concepts: privllte enemy/public or political
enemy (ekhthroslpollmios, inimicus/hostis), war and internal dissension, war
and civil war (polemos/stasis). The detour was necessary in order to try to
understand what 'enemy', 'on our side, on the home front', has meant over
the centuries. And in what respect, if Schmitt is to be believed, politics
could never be thought without knOwing what 'enemy' means, nor a
decision made without knowing who the enemy is. That is to say: without
the identification by which the enemy is identified, himself, and by which
one is identified, onesel£
We shall try to show further on in what respect this double identification
engages in privileged fashion both brother friends and brother enemies in
the same process of fraternization.
Henceforth, things have begun to appear a little more complicated than
Schmitt has it. In any case, in the Platonic justifications he finds for a
semantics without which his discourse would become dangerously fragile.
We shall take them into account in making a few more steps in our reading
of The Concept of the Political (1932) and in the singular itinerary that this
work will have begun, down to the Theone du partisan. Note inddente relative
au concept du politique (1962).
Notes
1. Human All Too Human, 2, Assorted opinions and maxims, 242, p. 274.
2. 'As for the name ... that is called democracy', in L'Invention d'Athenes. Histoire
de I'oraison jimebre dans la 'ate dassique', 1981, second edition, Payot, 1993, pp. 225,227.
[TIle Invention of Athens: TIle Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Shendan,
Harvard Univel'Slty Press, Cambndge, MA and London, 1986, pp. 217, 219.]
THE PHANTOM FRIEND RETURNING 107
3. La Boetie, 'To Michel de Montaigne'.
4. In order to hmtt at least one inevitable ambiguity, let us say immediately and
straightforwardly that the deconstructive reading of Schmittian thought that we shall
attempt here will keep two convictions in view.
The first concerns the undeniable link between this th10king of the political and
politlcal thought on the one hand and, on the other, Schmitt's pohtical commttrnents,
those wruch led to his arrest and conVlction after the war. In many respects, these
commttments often appear more serious and more repugnant than those of Heidegger
(see, for Instance, rus anti-Semttlc declaratlons on the 'Jewish falsifications of the concept
of spint' quoted by Habennas 10 'German Idealtsm and its Jewish Thmkers', Profiles
philosophiques et politiques, TEL, Gallimard 1974, p.83; and, more recendy, 'Le besoin
d'une contmulte allemande. Carl Schtrutt dans l'histOlre des idees politlques de la RFA
[,The Need for Gennan Continuity. Carl Schmitt 10 the History of Political Ideas in
the GFR] 10 Les Temps modernes, no. 575, June 1994).
But the second convlctlOn is that thIS should not distract us from a senous reading,
nor keep us from tak10g up a thought and a work so deeply rooted in the richest
tradition of the theological, jundlcal, political and philosophical culture of Europe, in
that of a European law of which this Catholic thmker (who probably remained a Nazi
for a much longer period of time than he publicly confessed, and no doubt remamed
antl-Semttic for the rest of his hfe - and the forms of his anti-Semitism were extremely
Vlrulent) claimed to be the last - fervent - advocate. To exacdy thts extent this thought
and this work repeatedly presaged the fearsome world that was armouncing Itself from
as as early as the 1920s. As though the fear of seeing that which comes to pass take place
in effect had honed the gaze of this besieged watchtnan. Following our hypothesis, the
scene would be thus: lucidity and fear not only drove trus terrified and insomniac
watcher to anticipate the storms and seISmic movements that would wreak havoc with
the histoncal field, the pohtlcal space, the borders of concepts and countries, the
) axiomatlcs of European law, the bonds between the tellurian and the political, the
techrucal and the politlcal, the merua and parliamentary democracy, etc. Such a
,~ 'watcher' would thereby have been more attuned than so many others to the fragility
~
, and 'deconstructible' precariousness of structures, borders and axioms that he wished to
protect, restore and 'conserve' at all costs. This lucidity - that is, the courage ofhis fear
! - also led him to multiply, in the panic of a defensive strategy, the most paradoxical of
l
alhances, thereby revealing fonnal combmations whose possibility is still today in the
greatest need of meditation: how does the most uncompromisingly conservatlve
discourse, that of Schmitt, manage to affinn, 10 certam respects, so many affintties with
what are apparendy, from Lentn to Mao, the most revolutionary movements of our
tlme? Who would have been their common enemy? And how can one explain the
interest in Schmitt shown by a certam extreme-left-wmg movement, in more thart one
country? How IS this sull-active influence to be explained, despite so many trials? There
is more to be learned from these equivocations than from many nght-minded
denunciations that take shelter behind a chronic wave of contagious or objectlve
alhances. These indolent denunciations often use thts disqUiet and the emptncally
estabhshed fact of 'evil 1Ofiuences' as a pretext, without havmg anything else to say on
the matter, for shirkmg and for detemng others from the task of rearung, from the work
and from the question. Those who are satisfied With mere denunclatlon too often
conceal their apathy and nusapprehenslon - mdeed, their dental of the very thtng that