The Politics of Friendship

This book has its origins in the seminar that Jacques Derrida gave during the academic year 1988-89, as part of his late attempt to grapple with issues of political philosophy that he also deals with in his Specters of Marx. The book itself is an extended replay of the first session of the seminar, in which the French philosopher (who died in 2004) gave an overview of the themes that he would cover at more length during the year, beginning with the apostrophe: "O my friends, there are no friends" that Montaigne attributes to Aristotle. I was fortunate enough to attend that lecture and some of those that followed. The desire to retrieve that experience from the past and to compare the understanding of the written text with the impression left by the oral intervention certainly drove me to read this volume, with the English language providing an additional distance that I somehow find necessary to break with the immediacy of my native French. The stage was set twenty years ago at the salle Dussane of the Ecole Normale Superieure, before an audience composed of fellow academics, faithful followers and curious onlookers, drawn together by the intellectual aura of the French philosopher who was at the peak of his public career. The atmosphere was quite different from the scenes of mass hysteria that are said to have accompanied the seminar of Jacques Lacan in that very same conference room some twenty years before, with swooning ladies fainting over the words of the Maitre and fanatical psychoanalysts arguing furiously over Freud's legacy. The cosmopolitan nature of the audience, composed mainly of foreigners, bore witness to the international following that Derrida's brand of philosophy already attracted, as well as to the conservatism of French philosophy students, who tended to shun this lecture in favor of more academically correct seminars. Reading Derrida or other French authors like Bataille, Foucault, Barthes or Bourdieu is sometimes considered as a kind of rite of passage into the world of rebellious intellect. Such motivation was not absent from my decision to attend that seminar, which had no connexion whatsoever with my university major in economics. But if I or others were in for the show, for a kind of post-modern happening, then the lecture was certainly a deception. As a philosopher molded in the classical tradition, deeply familiar with the canon of great authors that he quoted in their original language (be it Greek, Latin, German or English), Derrida expected the same kind of familiarity, and the same language skills, from his listeners. I remember my sense of frustration and awe as I realized that my philosophical background, limited to a course in classical philosophy during high school and preparatory class as well as personal readings of contemporary French authors, hadn't prepared me at all to dealing with the many quotes, allusive references and close readings of topical excerpts that were thrown at us during that first

Some things that I have previously written about fools were undoubtedly reinforced by my earlier attempt to gain something from this book. Now that I have returned to this book with all the seriousness that creative intellectual labor demands when it is not in a good mood, my concern is with a portion of Chapter 4, "The Phantom Friend Returning (in the name of `Democracy')" stated most concisely on pages 81-82, "with neither consciousness nor memory of its compulsive droning" being applied to "what has become the real structure of the political ~ . . . the marks and the discourse that give it form ~ to allow us to speak of them in such a way today, seriously and solemnly?" Whatever is being discussed here is leading to a German thinker on page 83: "This tradition takes on systematic form in the work of Carl Schmitt." The flip side of things is actually the case. "As soon as war is possible, it is taking place, . . . in a society of combat, in a community presently at war, since it can present itself to itself, as such, only in reference to this possible war." (p. 86) "The concept of the enemy is . . . the very concept of the political." (p. 86)Perhaps this is only serious in a sense in which psychosis might be considered serious, or a political professional might be considered engaged in something like the practice of law, or a majority of the Supreme Court might think that people shouldn't count... because their wishes and desires will prevent them from maintaining any hard and fast rules about how they are counting. This is about the same as the democratic principles for friendship which are the topic of this book. Comedians might have predicted that if a presidency were to go, either to a guy that they thought was too smart, or to the dumb guy, the law ought to prefer the dumb guy anyway, because the law is like comedy, playing to the same audience. It might not always be right, but the audience always gets the jokes about the dumb guy. Derrida is not providing an index or bibliography with this work, just notes at the end of the chapters, so it wasn't easy for me to find comic elements of this book to pursue. I think he is fond of more troubling aspects of reality, like TRAGIC WAYS OF KILLING A WOMAN by Nicole Loraux and the usual Greek philosophers. As far as my concerns about the war on drugs, he provides some reasons for thinking that with the powers of high altitude herbicide spraying available today, we are capable of destroying much more of Columbia for each opium user here at home than back when Nietzsche was taking opium. When Derrida wrote this book, he might not have been thinking that the United States would be doing that by now, but it must be true.

Derrida's latest book continues what has been pecieved as an 'ethical turn' in deconstruction, intiated with 1994's "Spectres of Marx," and the subesquent rich contribution of 'deconstructionists' to political and moral thinking. However, Derrida himself contends that his entire project would have been unthinkable without some form of Marxism, and I share emphatically the view of Critchley, Laclau et al that questions of ethics and politics lie at the heart of the deconstructive enterprise. It is such a reading that gives this latest text a crucial location in the most contempoarary of politics. And those who contend that Derrida's (and the continental tradtion's legacy in general) has nothing 'practical,' 'useful' to say about the conduct of states and peoples in something called the 'real world,' need only refer to the Middle East situation, and the endlessly shifting notions of 'friends' and 'enemies' in that region to begin to grasp the paradoxical importance of Aristotle's strange address, inverted by Nietzsche, "O my friends, there are no friends," around which Derrida constructs his arguments. Where do the boundairies of friendship lie - is not our closest friend also, as Nietzsche suggested long ago, also our greatest enemy? Throughout the years of the Cold War, such questions may have seemed irrelevant, facticious. For those of us in the West, it was US and them, the USSR, the Warsaw Pact. Complicated though the transactions may have been, it was between two concretely opposed and finished blocs. Today the questions are rarley so simple - is the US a friend, to those in Britain? But which US - for it is surely now not an homogenous entity if it ever was. And which Russia do we hold dear? The collsape of stable relasionships between states of the world precipates a collaspe of recognition and identification within these states, via which we exist as political beings. Derrida's book is not the truth of friends, but in myraid different ways explores the legacy in various philosophical traditions of the dicotomy friend / enemey, and opens new and vital interpretations of our contempoarary state.