Politics of Friendship

‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ This strange and provocative address, attributed to Aristotle and interrogated and re-inflected by many subsequent philosophers, provides the focus and keynote for each of the ‘ten chapters of Jacques Derrida’s long-awaited new book. The ‘political turn’ many noted in Derrida’s Spectres of Marx continues here is a profound exploration of political history of Aristotle’s haunting exclamation, of the singularities and pluralities of friendship as it is conceived of by thinkers as diverse as Montaigne and Kant, Nietzsche (‘O enemies, there are no enemies’), Carl Schmitt (‘For as long as a people exists politically, it must determine by itself the distinction of friend and enemy’) and Blanchot of The Writing of the Disaster and Michel Foucault As I Imagine Him. Throughout the book, Derrida recalls and restages the reversals and contaminations that, despite the most rigorous will try to clarify, have made friendship and enmity, private and public life, and in the end the totality of the oppositional couples that make up the western political and philosophical tradition, dangerously and madly unstable. At issues is an anti-genealogy, upsetting the genealogical motive itself: the order of filiation and preference, the familial and phallocentric schema of fraternity, and the virility of virtue whose authority has traditionally gone unquestioned in our culture of frindship and models of democracy. The future of the political, for Derrida, becomes the future of friends, the possibility of a radically new friendship, a deeper and more inclusive democracy. The remarkable book, his most important for many years, offers a challenging and inspiring vision of that future, of an unheard-of friendship which he claims is not present but is already upon us, at the end of philosophy and on the threshold of philosophies and politics to come. Jacques Derrida is Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hauted Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and holds a visiting appointment at the University of California, Irvine, Recent English translations of his work include Given Time, Memories of the Blind, Spectres of Marx and The Gift of Death.