Читать книгу The Politics of Friendship - Jacques Derrida - Страница 10

It seems to me that the meditations of a man of state must centre on the question of enemies in all its aspects, and he owes it to himself to have taken a keen interest in this saying of Xenophon: ‘the wise man will profit from his enemies’. Consequently, I have collected the remarks I have recently made, in approximately the same terms, on this subject, and I will send them to you. I have abstained as much as possible from quoting what I had written in my Political Precepts, since I see that you often have this book in hand.¹

Plutarch

A good-natured hare wanted to have many friends.

Many! you say – that is a major affair:

A single friend is a rare thing in these parts.

I agree, but my hare had this whim and didn’t know what

Aristotle used to say to young Greeks upon entering his school:

My friends, there are no friends.

Complacent, assiduous, always driven by zeal,

He wanted to make everyone a faithful friend,

And believed himself loved because he loved them.²

Florian

Now. Perhaps we are ready, now, to hear and understand the Nietzschean apostrophe, the cry of the ‘living fool that I am’: ‘Friends, there are no friends!’ (Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde!) Perhaps we are better exposed to it, there where its destination also depends on us. Its destiny, perhaps, rides on the event of a response that has come, like the responsibility of a countersignature, from its addressees. Who will come to countersign? What? How? How many?

The apostrophe resounds in Human All Too Human, in the chapter ‘Of friends’.³ It also plays with a tradition deeper and wider than any of us could fathom: Aristotle, Montaigne, Plutarch, Gradan – Oráculo manual – Florian, and so many others awaiting us. Most often they appeal to a wisdom, and this wisdom usually derives its authority from a political experience. In any case, it draws from such experience political lessons, moralities and precepts to be used by wise politicians.

Once again – we will hear it – the provocation strikes and opens with a ‘perhaps’. It opens as much as it opens up, it breaks in. The irreducible modality of the ‘perhaps’ always gives the opening note. ‘Perhaps’ gives it as a sharp rap is administered. ‘Perhaps’ gives it with the announcement of a first act or a first scene; but also as the only chance granted to the future. More precisely, the chance of the future as chance itself. Future there is, if there ever is, when chance is no longer barred. There would be no future without chance. The rap of the ‘perhaps’ not only effects a catastrophic inversion, a reversal of the tradition – already paradoxical (‘O my friends, there is no friend’) – it provokes the avowal of the opposite, the confession of an error that is not foreign to the truth. This is perhaps truth itself, a superior or more profound truth.

And perhaps to each of us there will come the more joyful hour, when we exclaim:

‘Friends, there are no friends!’ thus said the dying sage;

‘Foes, there are no foes!’ say I, the living fool.

Und vielleicht kommt jedem auch einmal the freudigere Stunde, wo er sagt:

‘Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde!’ so rief der sterbende Weise;

‘Feinde, es gibt keinen Feind!’ – ruf ich, der lebende Tor.⁴

Numerous roads promise to open up on a reading of this reversing [renversante] apostrophe – an overwhelming one, too, since it converts the friend into the enemy. Someone complains, in sum, about the disappearance of the enemy. Would it already have taken place? In any case, this person fears that it has; he recalls it, announces and denounces it as a catastrophe. We shall listen once again, at more or less regular intervals, to a double clamour, the two times and two voices, the two persons of this exclamation: he/I, he exclaimed/I exclaimed, past/present, dying/living, wisdom/madness. But a single cry answers the other: this is what the dying sage cried, this is what I cry, I, the living fool, etc.: so rief der sterbende Weise … ruf ich, der lebende Tor.

‘That saying which Aristotle often repeated’ is, then, indeed one of someone who is dying – his last will and testament – already speaking from the place of death. A testamentary wisdom to which must be opposed, even at the price of madness, the exclaiming insurrection of the living present. The dying person addresses friends, speaking of friends to them, if only to tell them there are none. As for the living person, he addresses enemies, speaking to them of enemies, if only to tell them there are none. The dying person dies, turning towards friendship; the living person lives on, turning towards enmity. Wisdom on the side of death, and the past came to pass: the being-past of the passer-by. Madness on the side of life, and the present is: the presence of the present.

This is far from the only time, as we have seen, that Nietzsche associates the thought of the friend-enemy or of the brother-enemy with madness, with sheer madness that begins by inverting all the senses of sense into their opposites. For sheer madness is a priori inscribed in the very sense of sense. The fool is already on the premises as a guest who would have preceded his host. He haunts him in advance, his shadow is watching in the darkness of all hospitality: Human All Too Human is a fool addressing fools, his friends the fools.

The book is literally dedicated to a corporation of fools (Narren-Zunft). The madness is the dedication and the signature at the end. The verse epilogue, the post-lude (Ein Nachspiet), is entitled ‘Among Friends’ (Unter Freunden), and it also addresses an apostrophe to them, the friends. He asks neither to be excused nor pardoned for this book of unreason (diesem unvernunftigen Buche), only for the kind of hospitality offered to mad arrivants. He requests only that they open the doors of their hearts to him, that they listen to him, welcoming him into their selves; that they put him up, honour him – and learn from him, in sum, a history of reason. Only a fool can tell this story, only he can know how to submit reason to reason, how reason becomes what it should have been: finally brought to its senses.

Having said this, we are going to read the book’s final lines and the envoy. It, too, is pronounced in the form of a salute or a leavetaking. A moment of separation with friends at last – friends who have become friends – and the testamentary connotation is not absent. All the more so given that in the middle of the epilogue, the epilogual nature of the apostrophe – that is, the beginning of the end – does not fail to appear. We shall have to climb the road separating us from the cemetery: ‘Till we reach the grave together. Friends!…’ Bis wir in the Grube steigen. /Freunde!

If the address requests that we go beyond excuse and pardon, it still moves in the religious space of benediction or malediction. Unless this space would at last be opened by it. It conjures up malediction (Fluch) and pronounces benediction twice (Amen!, Und auf Wiedersehn!) in offering the promised coming of the event – in exposing, rather, the arriving stance [arrivance] of the question of the perhaps (‘So soils geschehn?’):

Shall we do this, friends, again? … (Freunde! Ja! So soils geschehn?)

Amen! Und auf Wiedersehn!

No excuses! No forgiving!

You who laugh and joy in living

Grant this book, with all its follies (Diesem unvernunftigen Buche)

Ear and heart and open door!

Friends, believe me, all my folly’s (meine Unvemunft)

Been a blessing heretofore!

What I seek, what I discover – (Was ich suche, was ich finde –,)

Has a book contained it ever?

Hail in me the guild of fools! (die Narren-Zunft!)

Learn what this fools-book’s (Narrenbuche) offence is:

Reason coming to its senses! (Wie Vernunft kommt – ‘sur Vernunft’!)

Shall we, friends, do this again? (Also, Freunde, soils geschehen? –)

Amen! Und auf Wiedersehn!

The envoy thus confirms that the friend cannot address anything other than a fool’s discourse to his friends. The truth of friendship is a madness of truth, a truth that has nothing to do with the wisdom which, throughout the history of philosophy qua the history of reason, will have set the tone of this truth – by attempting to have us believe that amorous passion was madness, no doubt, but that friendship was the way of wisdom and of knowledge, no less than of political justice.

Let us return now to ‘Enemies, there is no enemy!’, at paragraph 376 of Human All Too Human, 1. Let us recall only the following for the moment: that the reversal had been prepared by an avowal. By a sort of response to self; already, the same ‘sage’ – the presumed author of ‘O my friends’ – when he was not yet ‘dying’, accepted in the prime of life to contradict himself. In any case, he consented to declaring to himself an ‘error’ and an ‘illusion’ while appealing, in sum, to responsibility. A responsibility which, following the more or less latent – and thus silent – logic of the argument, can be exercised only in silence – indeed, in secret – in a sort of counterculture of knowing-how-to-keep-silent. As though the sage were speaking silently to himself about silence, answering himself saying nothing – in order to appeal to responsibility. One must know how to reach such silence; ‘they’ must learn how (‘und Schweigen mussen sie gelemt haben’):

When one realizes this, and realizes in addition that all the opinions of one’s fellow men, of whatever kind they are and with whatever intensity they are held, are just as necessary and unaccountable (unverantwortlich) as their actions; if one comes to understand this inner necessity of opinions originating in the inextricable interweaving of character, occupation, talent, environment – perhaps one will then get free of that bitterness of feeling with which the sage cried: ‘Friends, there are no friends! (Freunde, es gibt keine Freunde!).’ One will, rather, avow to oneself (Er wird sich vielmehr eingestehen): yes, there are friends, but it is error and deception regarding yourself that led them to you; and they must have learned how to keep silent in order to remain your friend (und Schweigen mussen sie gelernt haben um dir Freund zu bleiben); for such human relationships almost always depend upon the fact that two or three things are never said or even so much as touched upon: if these little boulders do start to roll, however, friendship follows after them and shatters. Are there not people who would be mortally wounded if they discovered that their dearest friends actually know about them?

Friendship does not keep silence, it is preserved by silence. From its first word to itself, friendship inverts itself Hence it says, saying this to itself, that there are no more friends; it avows itself in avowing that. Friendship tells the truth – and this is always better left unknown.

The protection of this custody guarantees the truth of friendship, its ambiguous truth, that by which friends protect themselves from the error or the illusion on which friendship is founded – more precisely, the bottomless bottom founding a friendship, which enables it to resist its own abyss. To resist the vertigo or the revolution that would have it turning around itself. Friendship is founded, in truth, so as to protect itself from the bottom, or the abyssal bottomless depths.

That is why friendship had better preserve itself in silence, and keep silent about the truth. Over the abyss, on the shifting ground of our friendships: ‘how uncertain (unsicher) is the ground upon which all our alliances and friendships rest, … how isolated (vereinsamt, solitary, insularized, ‘solitarized’) each man is’ (ibid.); that is what you will say to yourself, with so much experience of ‘misunderstandings’, ‘ruptures’, ‘hostile fleeings’ [‘fuites hostiles’]. So you had better keep silent about this truth of truth. The truth of truth is that the truth is there to protect a friendship that could not resist the truth of its illusion. Nietzsche affects a mystical tone when he puts forward aphoristic precepts and sentences (Spruche) that he then names, in Latin, Silentium. Asceticism, kenosis, knowledge of how to evacuate words to gain breathing space for friendship. Here again, Nietzsche thinks silence from the standpoint of friendship, as though silence itself could not be spoken about, as though it could not be spoken elsewhere than in friendship, by friendship. Speech ruins friendship; it corrupts by speaking, degrades, belittles, undoes the speech (verredet) of friendship; but this evil is done to it on account of truth. If silence must be kept among friends, concerning friends, this is just as much so as not to tell the truth, a murderous truth. ‘Silentium. One should not talk (reden) about one’s friends: otherwise one will talk away the feeling of friendship (sonst verredet man sich das Gefühl der Freundschaft).’⁵

Not that friends should keep silent, among themselves or on the subject of their friends. Their speech would perhaps have to breathe with an implied silence. This is nothing other than a certain way of speaking: secret, discreet, discontinuous, aphoristic, elliptic, just in disjointed time to avow the truth that must be concealed; hiding it – because it is deadly – to save life. To avow or not to avow – what difference does it make, since the avowal consists in hiding the truth even more safely? What is the truth of a confession? Not the veracity of what it says, but its confessional truth?

At least for the time being, let us speak this moment of avowal, for perhaps, perhaps the day of joy will come when the living fool (that I am) will dare to exclaim: ‘there is no enemy!’. This day of joy, as we recall, will be one of a shared rejoicing (Mitfreude), not fellow-suffering (Mitleid). For there would then be two communities without community, two friendships of solitude, two ways of saying to oneself – keeping silent, keeping it hushed – that solitude is irremediable and friendship impossible; two ways for desire to share and to parcel out the impossible: one would be the compassionate and negative way, the other affirmative, which would attune and join two disjointed rejoicings [jouissances] conjugated at the heart of the dissociation itself: heterogeneous allies, co-affirmed, perhaps affirmed in total darkness. An ecstatic rejoicing but one without plenitude, a communion of infinite wrenching.

In the meantime, in the course of the first avowal’s moment, which still belongs to the community of compassion, you had better keep silence to preserve what remains of friendship. And as the friends know this truth of truth (the custody of what cannot be kept), they had better keep silent together. As in a mutual agreement. A tacit agreement, however, whereby those who are separated come together without ceasing to be what they are destined to be – and undoubtedly what they more than ever are: dissociated, ‘solitarized’, singularized, constituted into monadic alterities (vereinsamt); where, as the phenomenologist says, what is proper to the alter ego will never be accessible, as such, to an originarily bestowing intuition, but only to an analogical apresentation. These two are not in solidarity with one another; they are solitary, but they ally themselves in silence within the necessity of keeping silent together – each, however, in his own comer. This is, perhaps, a social bond, a contemporaneity, but in the common affirmation of being unbonded, an untimely being-alone and, simultaneously, in joint acquiescence to disjunction. How can you be together to bear witness to secrecy, separation, singularity? You would have to testify where testimony remains impossible. You would have to witness the absence of attestation, and testify in behalf of that absence, as Blanchot says (‘Speech still to be spoken beyond the living and the dead, testifying for the absence of attestation.’⁶) How can one be silent, one and the other, one the very other [l’un l’autre même]?

This ‘miteinander Schweigen’ can always come to ruin our ontological assurances, our common sense, our concept of the concept, the One of the common that has always commanded our thought as well as our politics of friendship. How can a politics of separation be founded? Nietzsche dares to recommend separation, he dares to prescribe distancing in the code excluding distance, in this very distance, and as if he were provoking it, in the language that remains as much that of friendship as that of politics, of state, of family (affinity, kinship, Verwandschaft, appurtenance, the co-appurtenance of identity: Zusammengehorigkeit):

In parting (Im Scheiden). It is not in how one soul approaches another but in how it distances itself from it that I recognize their affinity and relatedness (Verwandschaft und Zusammengehorigkeit).⁷

What is keeping silent? Keeping silent among friends, unter Freunden, in the rupture (im Scheiden), in the interruption that substitutes, as it must (for in silence, everything must be possible), testimony for know-how, faith for the test, ‘fidence’ for demonstration, the perhaps for certainty, the other for the same, friendship for calculation, etc.? The imperative and the enigma of the sense of decency [pudeur] are not far off; we shall link them in a moment to the perhaps, to the truth and to the question of sexual difference – in Nietzsche’s writing, his silence, his erasure without erasure.

Perhaps this is an altogether different way of thinking the ‘among’, of apprehending the ‘among friends’, from within the silence of friends – and not the opposite. A particular ‘among’ would be incommensurable to all others. This is when the end begins, the incipit of the epilogue, the advent of the first verses of the Nachspiel whose second stanza we quoted. Silence among friends will not work without laughter, and laughter bares its teeth, as does death. And the more evil it is, the better. Doing and laughing, machen/lachen, doing evil and laughing at evil, making each other laugh about evil. Among friends. Not laughing evil away, but making ourselves laugh at evil. Among friends.

(You will not, perhaps, have failed to register the fact that we are writing and describing friends as masculine – neuter-masculine. Do not consider this a distraction or a slip. It is, rather, a laborious way of letting a question furrow deeper. We are perhaps borne from the very first step by and towards this question: what is a friend in the feminine, and who, in the feminine, is her friend? Why do ‘our’ philosophers and ‘our’ religions, our ‘culture’, acknowledge so little irreducible right, so little proper and acute signification, in such grammar? In an unpublished passage of Beyond Good and Evil – precisely around paragraph 2 on the ‘dangerous perhaps’ of the ‘new philosophers’ which we were questioning above – Nietzsche will have bequeathed us a certain number of unerased sentences. They take the movement of truth up into the folds of a veil, and this is always ‘truth’ suspended between inverted commas, the veiled truth of decency, as Nietzsche often says. But some of these phrases also inscribe the ‘perhaps’, which is never dissociated from veiled decency, in a staging of feminine seduction where it would be arduous to distribute place, praise, and blame. The veil, and decency too, may signify the absence of courage. In the first draft, in the insistent mode of ‘perhaps’, and not far from the ‘dangerous perhaps’, we can read, for example:

But who has the courage to look on these ‘truths’ without a veil? Perhaps there exists a legitimate decency before these problems and possibilities, perhaps we are mistaken about their value, perhaps we all thereby obey this will, (emphasis added)

A second draft contains two unerased conclusions:

1. But who is willing to concern himself with such ‘perhapses’! That violates good taste, especially virtue, when truth becomes scandalous to this point and renounces all decency: one must recommend prudence before that lady.

2. Perhaps! But who is willing to concern himself with these dangerous ‘perhapses’! That violates good taste, and also virtue. When truth becomes scandalous to this point, when this unscrupulous lady divests herself of her veils to this point and renounces all decency: away! Away with this seductress! May she henceforth go her own way! One can never be too prudent with a lady like that. You may tell me with a wink that ‘one is better off associating with a humble and modest error, with a nice little lie’.⁸

How much of a chance would a feminine friend have on this stage? And a feminine friend of hers, among themselves? See below.)

Among Friends

Epilogue

1

Fine to lie in quiet together

Finer still to join in laughing –

(Schon ists, miteinadander schweigen

Schoner, miteinander lachen, –)

Underneath a silken heaven

Lying back among the grasses

Join with friends in cheerful laughing,

(Lieblich laut mit Freunden lachen)

Showing our white teeth together.

Am I right? let’s lie in quiet;

Am I wrong? let’s join in laughing

And in being aggravating,

Aggravating, loudly laughing,

(Schlimmer machen, schlimmer lachen),

Till we reach the grave together.

(Bis wir in the Grube steigen.)

Not all silences chime together. Each time the quality, the modality, of the ‘keeping quiet together’ eludes a common measure. Here, we have just apprehended the moment when the keeping silent of compassion broke into laughter, into a resounding laughter but without a word, still silent, aphonic in the sonority of its break into laughter, into the hysterical laughter of rejoicing among friends.

[The question is one of tonality: Stimmung changes everything. Beyond the concept – even if it is the same one, and even if it becomes undecidable – Stimmung suspends or terrifies oppositions, converts the antithesis into its antithesis (friend into enemy, love into hate, etc.). There is little room for laughter in Heidegger. Nevertheless, if this subject did not result in too long a detour, we might recognize in the very possibility of this silence, the keeping-silent, the discretion, the secret of Schweigen or Verschwiegenheit, which Heidegger, as early as Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] (paras 34 and 60), analyses at the heart of speech. Finding the resource of its own silence in the possibility of speaking, that which thus keeps silent belongs from then on to truth – more precisely, to one of the essential modes (to wit, speech or discourse, Rede) of opening or disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), disclosedness to truth – that is, of truth ‘in which’ Dasein is, a Dasein originarily responsible, indebted or ‘responsibilizable’ (schuldig), but ‘in’ a truth that is every bit as originarily an ‘untruth’ (‘But Dasein is equiprimordially [gleichursprunglich] in the untruth’).⁹ We could demonstrate (and we would like to attempt this elsewhere) that this equiprimordiality of truth and untruth, like that of all the apparently opposite possibilities that are inextricably linked to it, destabilizes all the conceptual distinctions that seem to structure the existential analytic, dooming its logic to an Unheimlichkeit marking each of its decisive moments. In truth, it undoes, disidentifies, the identification of every concept. It appeals to a thinking beyond the concept, but a fortiori beyond intuition. It surpasses reason, but a fortiori the understanding too. This ‘thought’ – always supposing that the name fits the named and retains its validity beyond these final frontier oppositions; always supposing a proper name could be found for it in any singular language; always supposing that it still speculates – this excessive ‘thought’ belongs as little to the disinterested or theoretical, even discursive, order of philosophical speculation as the unchained desires of love and hate, friendship and enmity, when they unite in death, at any moment, in the taste of each of our desires. Defying all oppositions, this Unheimlichkeit would here suffice to usher in, between friend and enemy, every and all conversion, inversion and revolution [retournements]. It lodges the enemy in the heart of the friend – and vice versa. Why do we say it ‘lodges’ the other, the stranger, or the enemy? Because the word unheimlich is not unfamiliar, though it speaks precisely to the stranger, to the intimacy of the hearth and familial lodgings, to the oikeiótēs; but above all because it provides a place, in a troubling way, for a form of welcome in itself that recalls the haunt as much as the home – Unterkunft, lodgings, shelter, hospitable habitat, said the epilogue we cited above; and in a moment we will hear the voice of the friend as the voice of the spectre. The fact that in its very depth the keeping silent of Sein und Zeit never laughs will one day indicate to us one of the places for hearing once again the colloquy between Nietzsche and Heidegger, what there is ‘among [those] friends’ as well as ‘among [those] enemies’.]

We have just focused our attention on the avowed error, the endured illusion at the beginning of paragraph 376 of Human All Too Human – ‘Of friends’. The logic of avowal will justify, at the end of the paragraph, the inversion or conversion, the hour of joy that will come perhaps. This logic prepares the fool’s response, my living fool’s cry and the clamour of what could be called the call to the enemy: ‘Enemies, there is no enemy!’

Can an ‘alas!’, or an ‘if only there could be enemies’, or again: ‘instead of bewailing the friend, bewail the enemy!’, be inferred from this call? Perhaps. In all these hypotheses, this call to the enemy ipso facto converts the enemy into the friend: you must love your enemies, seine Feinde lieben, even if you pretend to love them, but no longer in a Christian fashion. And the friend is asked to convert himself into an enemy. No concept, nor any insurance contract between word and concept, vocable and meaning, is more stable, more reliable (bébaios, as Aristotle would say).

This conversion, then, will allow us no respite. We will never have done with it. In a modest book or elsewhere, for this interminability is no accident: one cannot, any more than one must not, have done with it. This is not a surpassable moment. It remains the structural condition of that which it must yet survive in making it possible: the sentence, the decision, the responsibility, the event, death itself.

Hence, we shall not finish with it. But the first reason that makes us wary of the opposition between the ‘dying sage’ and the ‘living fool’, and discourages any dwelling on the stabilized distinction between ‘Friends, there is no friend’ and ‘Enemies, there is no enemy’, is that one apostrophe can always feign to be the other. The dying sage can play fools, he can play the fool, and the fool can pretend to be wiser and deeper in death’s throes than the Greek philosopher that he has summoned to bear witness. The face of the fool can be a mask. Behind the mask, a sage wiser than the sage. Fundamentally, from one address to the other, the same person is speaking – him, me; and language liberates this substitution: ‘I’ is ‘me’, but an ‘I’ is a ‘him’. One is the other. One guards and guards himself from the other. One does violence to oneself, becoming violence. Here again the infinite build-up [surenchère, also a ‘raising of the stakes’], A build-up that does not even need an author’s intention, or a deliberate decision: it is carried away, it carries itself away, it throws itself into turmoil with the disidentification of concepts and terms that we are analysing right now.

But – no doubt by a stroke of luck – it happens that in another place, rather at one remove from here, Nietzsche himself seems to gloss these two sayings of the sage and the fool, the dying and the living, his saying and mine. He affects, perhaps, to provide us with a key for a reading of the score. Again it is in the Vermischte Meinungen und Spruch, paragraph 246. The French translation of the tide of this short section has: ‘The sage passing himself off as a fool’: Der Weise sich als Narren gebend: The sage giving himself up as a fool, the sage when he intends to give himself up for a fool, when he agrees to present himself as that which he is not. I prefer to keep, in its literality and playfulness, the reference to the present, the gift, to giving oneself up as. For the simulacrum of this sage knows how to offer himself, he makes a gift, he makes himself into a gift, inspired by a generous friendship. He thereby gives the good to avoid doing evil to his Umgebung: his entourage, milieu, relatives. And he feigns, lies, disguises or masks himself, out of friendship for mankind, out of Menschenfreundlichkeit. philanthropy once again, humanity, sociability. Here is the English translation which we will modify or compare with the words of the original version only when we consider it especially indispensable:

Paragraph 246. The wise man pretending to be a fool. The wise man’s philanthropy (Die Menschenfreundlichkeit) sometimes leads him to pose as excited, angry, delighted (sich erregt, erzurnt, erfreut zu stellen), so that the coldness and reflectiveness of his true nature (of his true essence, seines wahren Wesens) shall not harm those around him. (original emphasis)

Lie, mask, dissimulation, the simulacrum bestows. It also provokes vertigo: the sage, for friendship’s sake – this is what makes him a sage – takes on the disguise of the fool, and, for friendship’s sake, disguises his friendship as enmity. But what is he hiding? His enmity, for the coldness and lucidity of his true nature are to be feared only where they may hurt and reveal some aggressivity. In sum, the sage presents himself as an enemy in order to conceal his enmity. He shows his hostility so as not to hurt with his wickedness. And why does he take such pains? Out of friendship for mankind, philanthropic sociability. His pose (sich stellen) consists – in the sheer difference between hot and cold, exalted anger and icy lucidity – in feigning to be precisely what he is, in telling the truth to conceal the truth and especially to neutralize its deadly effect, to protect others from it. He loves them enough not to want to do them all the evil he wants for them. He loves them too much for that.

And what if tomorrow a new political wisdom were to let itself be inspired by this he’s wisdom, by this manner of knowing how to lie, dissimulate or divert wicked lucidity? What if it demanded that we know, and know how to dissimulate, the principles and forces of social unbinding [déliaison], all the menacing disjunctions? To dissimulate them in order to preserve the social bond and the Menschenfreundlichkeit? A new political wisdom – human, humanistic, anthropological, of course? A new Menschenfreundlichkeit pessimistic, sceptical, hopeless, incredulous?

A new virtue, from that point on?

The Nietzschean thought of virtue will not be simplified here. So very many apparently heterogeneous propositions would have to be not only reread but harmonized. The immense but rigorously coherent medley of Zarathustra’s addresses to his ‘brothers’ would also – and this would be an awesome and hitherto unaccomplished feat – have to be taken into account. Addresses to his friends who are also brothers. This consequence, in its shimmering mobility, its untenable instability, appears no less rigorous even though it is not systematic: not philosophical, moral, or theological. Its expository mode can never be reduced to what it nevertheless also is: the discipline of a psychology, a prophecy, a poetics. Our hypothesis is that the ‘genre’, the ‘mode’, the ‘rhetoric’, the ‘poetics’, and the ‘logic’ to which Zaradiustra’s songs belong – ‘Of the friend’, ‘Of the bestowing virtue’, ‘Of the virtuous’, Of the belittling virtue’ (examples of what interests us here) – could be determined, following old or new categories, only from the place of the very thing that is said there, in this specific place, about friendship and virtue, fraternity, and the saying of what is said there, in that way. We shall consider these passages when the time comes.

This said and this saying call for a new type of address. They claim as much, in any case, teleiopoetically. To take saying and the virtue of speaking about virtue seriously is to acknowledge the address of a vocation: the brothers (past, present or to come) for whom Zarathustra destines such a harangue on friendship and on virtue, an ever-evil virtue. The brothers? Why the brothers? The addressees, as always, lay down the law of genre. We must meditate upon this: the addressees are brothers, and their coming virtue remains virile. The Gay Science (para. 169) says that declared enemies are indispensable for men who must ‘rise to the level of their own virtue, virility (Mannlichkeit), and cheerfulness’.

We shall return to this later, then. But to confine ourselves here to the barest schema, let us note that the motive of virtue is never discredited – no more so than the word virtue, in its Greek or Judaeo-Christian cultural context. Virtue is regularly reaffirmed by Nietzsche according to a logic or a rhetoric that can be interpreted in at least three ways (at least three when the question concerns the author of ‘Our new “infinite” which never ceased to designate in this way a world that had become infinite again since opening for us onto an “infinity of interpretations.”’¹⁰):

1. the deliberate perversion of the heritage – the opposite meaning under the same word;

2. the restoration of a meaning perverted by the inherited tradition (Greek, Jewish, or Pauline-Christian);

3. or a hyperbolic build-up (more Greek or more Judaeo-Christian than the Greek or the Judaeo-Christian).

For this reason, one must not hesitate to take the ‘Path to a Christian virtue’ (Weg zu einer christlichen Tugend):¹¹ to learn from one’s enemies is the best path to loving them, for it puts us in a grateful mood towards them (one suspects that this is not the most Christian way of going down such a path, nor of thinking the unconscious of virtues). This again is a question of path, of progress along a path, of steps, gait, a way of walking, rather than a question of content. For there are ‘unconscious virtues’ – this, morality and philosophy could never admit – and like visible virtues, like those that one believes to be visible, these invisible virtues ‘follow their own course’ (gehen auch ihren Gang, with Nietzsche’s emphasis), but a ‘wholly different course’.¹² This difference comes to light only under a microscope, a divine microscope capable of perceiving delicate sculptures on the scales of reptiles.

Hence we will not be too surprised, alongside this praise of enmity or these calls to the enemy, to see Nietzsche honouring friendship, the ‘good friendship’ – even the Greek brand – and sometimes beyond ‘the things people call love’.

‘Good friendship’ supposes disproportion. It demands a certain rupture in reciprocity or equality, as well as the interruption of all fusion or confusion between you and me. By the same token it signifies a divorce with love, albeit self-love. The few lines defining this ‘good friendship’¹³ mark all these lines of division. ‘Good friendship’ can be distinguished from the bad only in eluding everything one believed one could recognize in the name friendship. As if it were a question of a simple homonym. ‘Good friendship’ is born of disproportion: when you esteem or respect (achtet) the other more than yourself. Nietzsche points out that this does not mean that one loves more than oneself – and there is a second division, within lovence, between friendship and love. ‘Good friendship’ certainly supposes a certain air, a certain tinge (Anstrich) of intimacy, but one ‘without actual and genuine intimacy’. It commands that we abstain ‘wisely’, ‘prudently’ (weislich), from all confusion, all permutation between the singularities of you and me. This is the announcement of the community without community of thinkers to come.

Is such a friendship still Greek? Yes and no. Does this question make sense? Yes and no. If what Nietzsche understands here under the name friendship, if what he wants to have us hear and understand or give us to hear and understand for the future still chimes with philía but is already no longer Greek, then this is another way of suggesting that this experience, with the help of no other, forbids us to place trust in some presumed unity of Greek culture, with respect to this point as to that of so many others.

Nietzsche knows better than anyone, when he writes ‘In honour of friendship’,¹⁴ that he is speaking Greek and that his argument, illustrated with a tale, portrays a Greek possibility. He honours it, precisely. But the tale reveals an internal contradiction in the Greek concept of friendship, the Greek virtue of friendship – more precisely, in its philosophical concept, as it could be implemented in a philosopher’s life. Nietzsche notes that in Antiquity the feeling of friendship was the highest, more elevated than the most celebrated pride of the sages, who boasted of their independence, autonomy and self-sufficiency. Certainly, this ‘unique’ feeling seemed to be indissociable from this pride, this freedom of self-determination from which it thus stemmed. Now the tale, setting face-to-face a king and a philosopher, a Macedonian king and a Greek philosopher, tends to mark a split between this proud independence, this freedom, this self-sufficiency that claims to rise above the world, and a friendship which should agree to depend on and receive from the other. The Athenian philosopher disdains the world, refusing as a result the king’s gift (Geschenk) of a talent. ‘What!’ demanded the king. ‘Has he no friend?’ Nietzsche translates: the king meant that he certainly honoured the pride of a sage jealous of his independence and his own freedom of movement; but the sage would have honoured his humanity better had he been able to triumph over his proud self-determination, his own subjective freedom; had he been able to accept the gift and the dependency – that is, this law of the other assigned to us by friendship, a sentiment even more sublime than the freedom or self-sufficiency of a subject. The philosopher discredited himself in his ignorance of one of the two sublime sentiments, in truth ‘the more elevated’ of the two.

A logic of the gift thus withholds friendship from its philosophical interpretation. Imparting to it a new twist, at once both gentle and violent, this logic reorientates friendship, deflecting it towards what it should have been – what it immemorially will have been. This logic calls friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymmetry or to disproportion, to the impossibility of a return to offered or received hospitality; in short, it calls friendship back to the irreducible precedence of the other. To its consideration [pré-venance, thoughtfulness of and for that which ‘comes before’]. But is there more or less freedom in accepting the gift of the other? Is this reorientation of the gift that would submit friendship to the consideration of the other something other than alienation? And is this alienation without relation to the loss of identity, of responsibility, of freedom that is also translated by ‘madness’, this living madness which reverses, perverts or converts (good) sense, makes opposites slide into each other and ‘knows’ very well, in its own way, in what sense the best friends are the best enemies? Hence the worst.

What concept of freedom – and of equality – are we talking about? And what are the political consequences and implications, notably with regard to democracy, of such a rupture in reciprocity – indeed, of such a divorce between two experiences of freedom that pride themselves on being respectively the hyperbole of the other?

With regard to democracy and with regard to justice? For we would be tempted to match Nietzsche’s gesture, as we have just seen it in outline, to the call he seems to be making for another justice: the one soon to be within reach of the new philosophers – the arrivants – the one already within their reach, since these arrivants, who are still to come, are already coming: ‘But what is needful is a new justice (Sondem eine neue Gerechtigkeit tut not!)’,¹⁵ just as we lack – it is the same sentence, the same need, the same exigency – ‘new philosophers’. The anchor must be raised with you, philosophers of a new world (for there is more than one [car il y en a plus d’un]), in a search for a justice that would at last break with sheer equivalence, with the equivalence of right and vengeance, of justice as principle of equivalence (right) and the law of eye for eye, an equivalence between the just, the equitable (gerecht), and the revenged (geracht) that Nietzschean genealogy has relentlessly recalled as the profound motivation of morality and of right, of which we are the heirs. What would an equality then be, what would an equity be, which would no longer calculate this equivalence? Which would, quite simply, no longer calculate at all? And would carry itself beyond proportion, beyond appropriation, thereby exceeding all reappropriation of the proper?

This ‘disappropriation’ [dépropriation] would undoubtedly beckon to this other ‘love’ whose true name, says Nietzsche in conclusion, whose ‘just name’ is friendship (Ihr rechter Name ist Freundschaft).¹⁶ This friendship is a species of love, but of a love more loving than love. All the names would have to change for the sake of coherence. Without being able to devote to it the careful reading it deserves, let us recall that this little two-page treatise on love denounces, in sum, the right to property. This property right is the claim [revendication] of love (at least, of what is thus named). The vindictive claim of this right can be deciphered throughout all the appropriative manoeuvres of the strategy which this ‘love’ deploys. It is the appropriating drive (Trieb) par excellence. ‘Love’ wants to possess. It wants the possessing. It is the possessing – cupidity itself (Habsucht); it always hopes for new property; and even the very Christian ‘love of one’s neighbour’ – charity, perhaps – would reveal only a new lust in this fundamental drive: ‘Our love of our neighbour – is it not a lust for new possessions? (Unsere Nächstenliebe – ist sie nicht ein drang nach neuem Eigentum?)’

This question is doubly important. In contesting the Christian revolution of love as much as the Greek philosophical concept of friendship – and just as much the norms of justice that depend on them – its target is the very value of proximity, the neighbour’s proximity as the ruse of the proper and of appropriation. The gesture confirms the warning accompanying the discourse on ‘good friendship’: not to give in to proximity or identification, to the fusion or the permutation of you and me. But, rather to place, maintain or keep an infinite distance within ‘good friendship’. The very thing that love – that which is thus named, ‘love between the sexes’, egotism itself, jealousy which tends only towards possession (Besitzen) – is incapable of doing.

Is this to say that friendship, rightly named, will carry itself beyond Eros? Beyond Eros in general? Or beyond love between two sexes?

Nietzsche does not unfold these questions in this form. But let us not conceal their radicality, which can become disquieting, particularly given the motive of the ‘new’ or of the ‘future’ that we perhaps too often trust as if it were univocal, simply opposed to the form of repetition and the work of the arch-ancient. For Nietzsche sees this drive of appropriation, this form always pushing for ‘new property’, at work everywhere, including where love loves in view of knowledge, of truth, of the novelty of the new, of all new reality in general: ‘Our love of our neighbour – is it not a lust for new possessions? And likewise our love of knowledge, of truth, and altogether any lust for what is new? (und uberhaupt all jener Drang nach Neuigkeiten?)’

If ‘new’ always means, again and again, once again, anew, the appropriative drive, the repetition of the same drive to appropriate the other for oneself, the truth, being, the event, etc., what can still take place anew? Anew? What remains to come? And what will become of our just impatience to see the new coming, the new thoughts, the new thinkers, new justice, the revolution or the messianic interruption? Yet another ruse? Once again the desire of appropriation?

Yes. Yes, perhaps.

And you must be coherent with this response. You must acquiesce to this principle of ruin at the heart of the most utterly new. It could never be eluded or denied.

And yet. At the heart of this acquiescence, just when a yes could be proffered to the principle of ruin, beyond knowledge and truth, precisely, an empty place would be left – left by Nietzsche as we would perhaps like to read him: a place open for that which can perhaps still take place – by chance. Favourable to friendship and like friendship, the friendship that would then deserve its just name. More precisely, favourable to the love whose just name would be friendship.

Because the adequation between the concept, the name, and the event could never be assured. Its appropriateness [jusresse] would not be regulated by the necessity of any knowledge. Perhaps, one day, here or there, who knows, something may happen between two people in love, who would love each other lovingly (is this still the right word?) in such a way that friendship, just once, perhaps, for the first time (another perhaps), once and only once, therefore for the first and last time (perhaps, perhaps), will become the correct name, the right and just name for that which would then have taken place, the condition being that it take place between two, ‘two people’, as Nietzsche specifies. But how can you adjust a name to what could take place only once, perhaps, for the first and last time? In other words – and in a much more general way this time – how can you name an event? For this love that would take place only once would be the only possible event: as an impossible event. Even if the right name for this unique love were to be found, how would you convince everyone else of its appropriateness? And what about the task of convincing the partner, at the moment of the act in which this love would essentially consist, that of giving him or her the name?

There would be no better way of honouring this chance than by quoting Nietzsche: Was alles Liebe gennant wird. But let us not quote him without underscoring in advance a point of logic, rhetoric – or onomastics: what might, then, very well happen, by chance, between two, between two in love, would cause no ripple in the calm waters of semantics. There would be no substituting or opposing: of one concept for another, one name for another, a friendship for a non-friendship, a friendship for an enmity, or a friendship for love. No, the ‘new’ that will perhaps come will be radically new – who knows? – but it might also take on the form of a development or a prolongation (Fortsetzung) of love. It would then be a new form of ‘lovence’, of the becoming-friendship of love, under the same name, but this time under the right same name, just for once, just this one time, adjusted rather to an incomparable time, unique and without a concept, at a particular date, between two. The friendship of these friends, if there are any of this kind, should their friendship take place one fine day, in the chance of a moment, an instant, with no assurance of duration, without the firm constancy of Aristotelian philía – this would be the condition of an improbable alliance in the thought of the perhaps. And since this thought to come is not a philosophy – at least, not a speculative, theoretical or metaphysical philosophy – not an ontology and not a theology, neither a representation nor a philosophical consciousness, at stake would be another experience of the perhaps: of thought as another experience of the perhaps. Hence another way of addressing, addressing oneself to the possible. Such a possible would no longer belong to the space of this possible, to the possibility of the possible whose concept would have assured its constancy, through so many mutations, from Aristotle to Hegel and Bergson. In order to open oneself to this other possibility of the possible, the word experience itself would have to refer to another concept. And attempt to translate itself if this other possibility were possible, into a political language. The price to pay, if this were necessary, would be having to change the meaning of the word ‘political’ – in other words, one would have to change politics.

Such a change to come is perhaps under way. But let us not be blind to the aporia that all change must endure. It is the aporia of the perhaps, its historical and political aporia. Without the opening of an absolutely undetermined possible, without the radical abeyance and suspense marking a perhaps, there would never be either event or decision. Certainly. But nothing takes place and nothing is ever decided without suspending the perhaps while keeping its living possibility in living memory. If no decision (ethical, juridical, political) is possible without interrupting determination by engaging oneself in the perhaps, on the other hand, the same decision must interrupt the very thing that is its condition of possibility: the perhaps itself. In the order of law, politics or morality, what would rules and laws, contracts and institutions indeed be without steadfast (bébaios) determination, without calculability and without violence done to the perhaps, to the possible that makes them possible? We insist on the decision in order to introduce the aporia in which all theory of decision must engage itself, notably in its apparently modern figures – for example, that of Schmittian decisionism, of its ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ or even neo-Marxist heritage, which we will take up later. Such a decisionism, as we know, is a theory of the enemy. And the figure of the enemy, condition of the political as such, takes shape in this century against the backdrop of its own loss: we would be losing the enemy, and thereby the political. But since when?

The aporia of the event intersects with, but also capitalizes or overdetermines, the aporia of decision with regard to the perhaps. There is no event, to be sure, that is not preceded and followed by its own perhaps, and that is not as unique, singular and irreplaceable as the decision with which it is frequently associated, notably in politics. But can one not suggest without a facile paradox, that the eventness of an event remains minimal, if not excluded, by a decision? Certainly the decision makes the event, but it also neutralizes this happening that must surprise both the freedom and the will of every subject – surprise, in a word, the very subjectivity of the subject, affecting it wherever the subject is exposed, sensitive, receptive, vulnerable and fundamentally passive, before and beyond any decision – indeed, before any subjectivation or objectivation. Undoubtedly the subjectivity of a subject, already, never decides anything; its identity in itself and its calculable permanence make every decision an accident which leaves the subject unchanged and indifferent. A theory of the subject is incapable of accounting for the slightest decision. But this must be said a fortiori of the event, and of the event with regard to the decision. For if nothing ever happens to a subject, nothing deserving the name ‘event’, the schema of decision tends regularly – at least, in its ordinary and hegemonic sense (that which seems dominant still in Schmittian decisionism, in his theory of exception and of sovereignty) – to imply the instance of the subject, a classic, free, and wilful subject, therefore a subject to whom nothing can happen, not even the singular event for which he believes to have taken and kept the initiative: for example, in an exceptional situation. But should one imagine, for all that, a ‘passive’ decision, as it were, without freedom, without that freedom? Without that activity, and without the passivity that is mated to it? But not, for all that, without responsibility? Would one have to show hospitality to the impossible itself – that is, to what the good sense of all philosophy can only exclude as madness or nonsense: a passive decision, an originarily affected decision? Such an undesirable guest can intrude into the closed space or the home ground of common sense only by recalling, as it were, so as to derive authority from it, an old forgotten invitation. It would thus recall the type or the silhouette of the classic concept of decision, which must interrupt and mark an absolute beginning. Hence it signifies in me the other who decides and rends. The passive decision, condition of the event, is always in me, structurally, another event, a rending decision as the decision of the other. Of the absolute other in me, the other as the absolute that decides on me in me. Absolutely singular in principle, according to its most traditional concept, the decision is not only always exceptional, it makes an exception for/of me. In me. I decide, I make up my mind in all sovereignty – this would mean: the other than myself, the me as other and other than myself, he makes or I make an exception of the same. This normal exception, the supposed norm of all decision, exonerates from no responsibility. Responsible for myself before the other, I am first of all and also responsible for the other before the other. This heteronomy, which is undoubtedly rebellious against the decisionist conception of sovereignty or of the exception (Schmitt), does not contradict; it opens autonomy on to itself, it is a figure of its heartbeat. It matches the decision to the gift, if there is one, as the other’s gift. The aporetic question ‘what can “to give in the name, to give to the name of the other” mean?’¹⁷ could translate into the question of the decision, the event, the exception, sovereignty, and so on. To give in the name of, to give to the name of, the other is what frees responsibility from knowledge – that is, what brings responsibility unto itself if there ever is such a thing. For yet again, one must certainly know, one must know it, knowledge is necessary if one is to assume responsibility, but the decisive or deciding moment of responsibility supposes a leap by which an act takes off, ceasing in that instant to follow the consequence of what is – that is, of that which can be determined by science or consciousness – and thereby frees itself (this is what is called freedom), by the act of its act, of what is therefore heterogeneous to it, that is, knowledge. In sum, a decision is unconscious – insane as that may seem, it involves the unconscious and nevertheless remains responsible. And we are hereby unfolding the classic concept of decision. It is this act of the act that we are attempting here to think: ‘passive’, delivered over to the other, suspended over the other’s heartbeat. For a few sentences earlier on, ‘its heartbeat’ had to be necessarily accorded thus: as the heartbeat of the other. Where I am helpless, where I decide what I cannot fail to decide, freely, necessarily, receiving my very life from the heartbeat of the other. We say not only heart but heartbeat: that which, from one instant to another, having come again from an other of the other to whom it is delivered up (and this can be me), this heart receives, it will perhaps receive in a rhythmic pulsation what is called blood, which in turn will receive the force needed to arrive.

The reader will have sensed that this is what I would be tempted to call ‘lovence’: love in friendship, lovence beyond love and friendship following their determined figures, beyond all this book’s trajectories of reading, beyond all ages, cultures and traditions of loving. This does not mean that lovence itself can take place figurelessly: for example, the Greek philía, courtly love, such and such a great current (as we call it) of mysticism. But a lovence cuts across these figures.

Providing you open yourself, trembling, on to the ‘perhaps’.

(We shall undoubtedly return to this point, directly or indirectly.)

That is what can take place, if one thinks with a minimum of coherence the logic of the perhaps. This is, rather, what can happen to logic following the experience of the perhaps. That is what may happen to experience, perhaps, and to the concept of experience. That is what could happen, if hope for such a thing were possible, among friends, between two, between two or more (but how many?), who love each other.

(In speaking like this, saying that love or friendship is improbable, I am saying nothing, I am neither stating nor describing anything. First of all because it is not certain that something of the sort exists, that anything ever exists outside of what I have to say about it, which you are reading perhaps in your own way; and this is precisely what I mean in drawing the perhaps into this free zone – where we can rely on nothing, nor count how many of us there are. Next, because no predication, no judgement of attribution – we have now seen this in sufficient depth – can measure up to what lets itself be thus marked – indeed, signed – by such a perhaps.

I am saying nothing, then, that can be said or is sayable.

And yet my saying, the declaration of love or the call to the friend, the address to the other in the night, the writing that does not resign itself to this unsaid – who could swear that they are consigned to oblivion simply because no said can speak them exhaustively?

The response no longer belongs to me – that is all I wanted to tell you, my friend the reader. And without knowing any longer if the rare or the numerous is preferable.

I assume responsibility for speaking rightly, justly, on this point, up until now, up to the point when I am no longer responsible for anything. Hence the point from which all responsibility is announced.)

This is undoubtedly only an active and hazardous, perhaps momentary, interpretation, of what Nietzsche thus said one day about chance, about the unknown factor, the ‘here and there’ of favour, of a sort of species of love, of the continuation or the follow-up to love, of a future for love the like of which it is not known if anyone will have ever had the experience. This is the conclusion of ‘The things people call love’ and, like a certain Aristotle, an Aristotle whose oligarchical recommendations no one, not even Nietzsche or Blanchot,¹⁸ will ever have disavowed, this conclusion pronounces something of a sentence on number. One must think and write, in particular as regards friendship, against great numbers. Against the most numerous who make language and lay down the law of its usage. Against hegemonic language in what is called public space. If there were a community, even a communism, of writing, it would above all be on condition that war be waged on those, the greatest number, the strongest and the weakest at the same time, who forge and appropriate for themselves the dominant usages of language – leaving open the question of knowing if the greatest force – in a word, hegemony or dynasty – is on the side of the greatest number; and if, as always according to Nietzsche, the greatest force be not on the side of the weakest – and vice versa. Cicero, as we recall, also explained in his own way this transmutation of weak into strong, dead into living, etc., and precisely as a history of friendship. This commutability is never alien to that which destabilizes the friend/enemy opposition. What, then, can the true name be? Of what ‘friendship’ can it be the ‘right name’? Is it only a name? Is it nameable, that which it is wearing itself out trying to name?

As we were saying, it would be better now to quote Nietzsche, to honour this chance:

At this point linguistic usage has evidently been formed (haben … den Sprachgebrauch gemacht) by those who did not possess but desired {the unfulfilled, those that covet out of need: die Nichthesitzenden und Begehrenden}. Probably, there have always been too many of these (immer zu viele). Those to whom much possession and satiety were granted in this area have occasionally (hier und da) made some casual remark about “the raging demon”, as that most gracious and beloved of all Athenians, Sophocles, did; but Eros has always laughed at such blasphemers; they were invariably his greatest favourites (seine grȯßten Lieblinge). – Here and there (hier und da) on earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love (eine Art Fortsetzung der Liebe) in which this possessive craving of two people for each other (bei der jenes habsuchtige Verlangen zweier Personen nacheinander) gives way to a new desire and lust for possession (einer neuen Begierde und Habsucht), a shared higher thirst [Nietzsche’s emphasis: einem gemeinsamen höheren Durste] for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship (Ihr rechter Name ist Freundschaft).

Questions remain. In this semantic upheaval, why these words and not others? And what do ‘reciprocal’ and ‘common’ and ‘ideal’ and ‘higher’ and ‘right’ mean? What does the adjective ‘just’ or ‘right’ mean for all these words? Friendship as a just name? Or enmity – supposing, precisely, that is its opposite?

To take an example and to put these questions differently, what does Blake mean? Heartbroken, let down in a friendship he believes betrayed,¹⁹ he asks or pretends to ask Hayley, his friend, to become his enemy (Do be my enemy): but he ordains it also, since the phrase is in the imperative voice, in the name of friendship, for love of friendship (for Friendships sake).

A last fidelity to some spectre of lost friendship? A living enemy, the friend would remain today more present, and more faithful in sum than under his misleading features, in the figure or the simulacrum of the unfaithful friend. There would be more attentive friendship, singular attention and consideration in a tension full of hatred. The enemy is then my best friend. He hates me in the name of friendship, of an unconscious or sublime friendship. Friendship, a ‘superior’ friendship, returns with the enemy. There would be an enemy’s fidelity.

The two concepts (friend/enemy) consequently intersect and ceaselessly change places. They intertwine, as though they loved each other, all along a spiralled hyperbole: the declared enemy (Blake declares the enemy by ordering him to declare himself: be my enemy), the true enemy, is a better friend than the friend. For the enemy can hate or wage war on me in the name of friendship, for Friendships sake, out of friendship for friendship; if in sum he respects the true name of friendship, he will respect my own name. He will hear what my name should, even if it does not, properly name: the irreplaceable singularity which bears it, and to which the enemy then bears himself and refers. If he hears my order, if he addresses me, me myself, he respects me, at hate’s distance, me beyond me, beyond my own consciousness. And if he desires my death, at least he desires it, perhaps, him, mine, singularly. The declared friend would not accomplish as much in simply declaring himself a friend while missing out on the name: that which imparts the name both to friendship and to singularity. That which deserves the name.

Every time, then, the issue involves the name. The name borne. The name which is imparted. The person imparting the name to the person to whom the name is handed down. The issue involves reference and respect. Each time, it involves what ‘declaring’ means: war, love, friendship. The difference between the two declarative regimes hesitates at this point between two truths, two logics of negation and denial, as between a logic of lying and a logic of the unconscious. These two logics cannot help but haunt one another. And share and separate even the concept of this haunting at work in the language of our time.

Hence, every time, a concept bears the phantom of the other. The enemy the friend, the friend the enemy.

In order to hear and understand this Blakeian vocative (Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake), one would have to do justice one day to the incessant return of his ghosts – of which there are so many in Blake – as well as to the infinite partition of all his divided spectres. Respect for the spectre, as Mary Shelley would say.

Singularly, to all the spectres of Jerusalem: ‘Half Friendship is the bitterest Enmity…’ ‘his Spectre also divided.… But still the Spectre divided, and still his pain increas’d!/In pain the Spectre divided.… And thus the spectre spoke: Wilt thou still go on to destruction? Till thy life is all taken away by this deceitful Friendship?’²⁰