The readings this week for my Friendship and Mourning course were Derrida’s essays “The Politics of Friendship” and “On Hospitality” as well as a piece from Allan Silver titled “Historical Moments of Friendship Ideals in Western Culture: Warrior Society, the Renaissance, Liberalism”. I’m one of three who had to create discussion points and questions for this week’s class meeting. I focused on Derrida’s “The Politics of Friendship” as I felt it framed the course, and some of the questions we were asking last week, really well (if you’d like to read these essays, let me know and I can email them to you – and, of course, contribute to conversation if you can!)
To begin, I’d like to bring attention to Derrida’s citation of Montaigne’s citation of Aristotle, “O my friends, there is no friend,” and reflect on the differences present in this saying, especially in the plural address “friends” and the singular general category “friend.”
In conjunction, we could read the following passage:
“…I still do not know if what exists between us is philia or homonomia, nor how one should distinguish here among us, among each one of us, who together would compose this as yet quite indeterminate ‘us’” (“The Politics of Friendship”, 633, my emphasis)
In reading this passage in conjunction with the first we should mark Derrida’s hesitance, a hesitance demonstrated throughout his works, to attempt to capture heterogeneous series (in this case the audience) under a general singular, i.e. “us,” “the friend,” etc.
Now, what are the implications of this hesitance when approaching the concepts “friend” and “friendship”? Well, from looking at the etymology of “friend” last week we saw, and I will only speak of the Greek philia due to familiarity, various idealizations of what a friend is. That is, these were analytic determinations of what constitutes a friend (ex.: “she has always been there for me, so she is a friend” and “he stole from me, therefore he must not be my friend” etc.). What these ideals of friendship attempt to do is capture or freeze an entire spectrum of possible relationships in advance, that is, to give a set of criteria which you then impose on the other person in order to determine whether he/she/it is your friend or not.
Already we have seen the problems that arise with this way of thinking about friendship, i.e. that friendship can only occur between men but also consider the implications for racial, national, class, species (etc.) exclusions in these ‘systems of friendship’.
So if Derrida has taken from himself the tool of analytic determination, how does he expect to think friendship?
Let’s look at his rhetoric: there is consistent use of words meant to designate a sort of coming before-ness, i.e. “before even haven taken responsibility” (633), “in relation to the Other prior to any organized socius” (644), “a sort of originary sociality is a law” (634), “The very possibility of the question, in the form of ‘what is…?’, seems always to have supposed this friendship prior to friendships, this anterior affirmation of being-together” (637), etc.
It seems then that Derrida is pushing us back before our commonsense and formal understandings of friendship (which he calls “that strange violence that has since forever insinuated itself into the origin of the most innocent experiences of friend or justice”) to force us to think of the conditions of possibility for friendship to ever occur in the first place. He writes, “Behind the logical game of contradiction or paradox [isn’t this a nice characterization of analytic determinations?], perhaps ‘O my friends, there is no friend’ signifies first and last this surpassing of the present [both temporal and “present” in the sense of “presence” as being before me] by the undeniable future anterior which would be the very movement and time of friendship” (637).
It is important to note, then, that Derrida views analytic determinations of friendship as too late to the scene and, in fact, as an erasure or covering over of an originary relation.
For discussion (with the assumption that we are on board with Derrida to this point):
- Stated explicitly on page 638, Derrida narrows in on what he calls “the question of the response” and “answering”: “what does it mean to respond or to answer and to whom or to what are we responding to?” are Derrida’s questions. We should discuss the dimensions of his meditations on responding and answering, i.e. to answer for, to answer to, and to answer before, and why he argues that “to answer before” appears “more original, more fundamental, and hence unconditional” (638).