Читать книгу The Politics of Friendship - Jacques Derrida - Страница 9

Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake

Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake.

Blake

Love of one’s enemies? I think that has been well learned: it happens thousandfold today.…¹

The life of the enemy. He who lives to combat an enemy must see to it that he remains alive.²

Nietzsche

‘O my friends, there is no friend’: wisdom and last will. The tone of the address is at first uncertain, no doubt, and we shall try here only one variation among so many other possibilities.³

But on a first hearing, one that lets itself be ingenuously guided by what some call ordinary language and everyday words, by an interpretation very close to some common sense (and that is quite a story already!), the sentence seems to be murmured. Mimicking at least the eloquent sigh, this interpretation takes on the sententious and melancholy gravity of a testament. Someone sighs; a wise man, perhaps, has uttered his last breath. Perhaps. Perhaps he is talking to his sons or his brothers gathered together momentarily around a deathbed: ‘Oh my friends, there is no friend’.

The testament thereby reaches us who also inherit it, beyond its natural and legitimate heirs, through an unindicated channel and with the meaning of the inheritance remaining to be deciphered. We are first of all ordered to understand it correctly. Nothing can justify once and for all my starting off, as I am in fact doing, from the place of the language and the tradition in which I myself inherited it – that is to say, the French of Montaigne. It so happens that we worry over this love of language when, in the place of the other, it becomes a national or popular cause. Without denying this limit, which is also a chance (for one must indeed receive the address of the other at a particular address and in a singular language; otherwise we would not receive it), I would like to recognize here the locus of a problem – the political problem of friendship.

The apostrophe ‘O my friends, there is no friend’ states the death of friends. It says it. In its ‘performative contradiction’ (one should not be able to address friends, calling them friends while telling them that there are no friends, etc.) this saying hesitates between the established fact – it has the grammatical form of such a fact – and the judgement of the sentence: so be it, since it is so; and keep it intact in memory, and never forget it. The address is addressed to memory but also comes to us from memory – and quoted from memory, for ‘the saying that Aristotle often repeated’, is quoted by Montaigne, as others had quoted it before him; he recites it by heart, where such an event is not attested by any literal document.

The death of friends, as we were saying above: both the memory and the testament. Let us recall, to begin with, that the chain of this quoted quotation (‘O my friends, there is no friend’) displays the heritage of an immense rumour throughout an imposing corpus of Western philosophical literature: from Aristotle to Kant, then to Blanchot; but also from Montaigne to Nietzsche who – for the first time, so it would seem – parodies the quotation by reversing it. In order, precisely, with the upheaval, to upset its assurance.

There is indeed something of an upheaval here, and we would like to perceive, as it were, its seismic waves, the geological figure of a political revolution which is more discreet – but no less disruptive – than the revolutions known under that name; it is, perhaps, a revolution of the political. A seismic revolution in the political concept of friendship which we have inherited.

Let us try to hear the ancestral wisdom of the address from within this place of reversal. What is there that is so stunning [renversant] here, and what has thereby been reversed? Here we have, for the first time, someone – another witness – coming forward to contest. He refuses even the accepted propriety of its paradox, as if the stakes were, then, to make it avow its other truth. In the history of the quoted quotation, in the incessant working? of its unfurling, Nietzsche’s upheaval would arrive as an interruption. It would inscribe in that history the scansion of an unprecedented event; but – hence the upsetting structure of the event – it would interrupt less than recall (and call again for) a rupture already inscribed in the speech it interrupts.

By starting with at least a clue to this event, at the other end of the chain, we would, once again, wish to throw up the question of friendship as the question of the political. The question of the political, for this question is not necessarily, nor in advance, political. It is perhaps not yet or no longer thoroughly political, once the political is defined with the features of a dominant tradition.

This counter-testimony occurs, as it rightly must, in Human All Too Human, when the excess of the beyond itself folds back into immanence, when what is human in man folds into the hem of the ‘all too’ of Nietzsche’s title, in the hollow of its vague [vague] modality, trembling and inscrutable but all the more forceful [déferlante, as in ‘une vague déferlante’ (breaking wave)]. The irresistible wave of the all too, a wave rolling up into itself, the enveloped violence of a wave welling up and falling back on itself. In this turn of the ‘all too’, around the ‘all too’ in its very revolution, another sentence begins in fact with a ‘perhaps’: there will come, perhaps; there will occur, perhaps, the event of that which arrives (und vielleicht kommt), and this will be the hour of joy, an hour of birth but also of resurrection; in any case, the passage from the dying to the living. Let us prick up our ears, for the moment, towards this perhaps, even if it prevents us from hearing the rest:

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.⁴

Why madness? And why should thought, the thought of friendship to come, lend itself inevitably, maddeningly, to madness? This long sentence should be quoted again, and in its original language. But let us observe in advance: such an event presents itself, certainly; it is, thus in the present, the event of a saying that speaks in the present. In the living present. It is the living fool that I am who is presently speaking to you. I say to you. Shouting, calling out (ruf ich…). An I is speaking to you. I am saying to you. You. I am speaking to you. To you, here and now, me: to remind or to announce, certainly; thus to tell you what is not yet, or what is no longer (the wisdom of the dying sage), but speaking to you in a perfectly present way.

If it reaches us none the less with something of a delay – that of a quotation already – this saying of the living fool speaks in the present. It spoke to you, it was in the present speaking to you in order to make a promise. This is not, this was not, just any promise. The promise promises in that fundamental mode of ‘perhaps’, and even the ‘dangerous perhaps’ which will open, as Beyond Good and Evil prophesies, the speech of philosophers to come.

What is going to come, perhaps, is not only this or that; it is at last the thought of the perhaps, the perhaps itself. The arrivant will arrive perhaps, for one must never be sure when it comes to arrivance; but the arrivant could also be the perhaps itself, the unheard-of, totally new experience of the perhaps. Unheard-of, totally new, that very experience which no metaphysician might yet have dared to think.

Now, the thought of the ‘perhaps’ perhaps engages the only possible thought of the event – of friendship to come and friendship for the future. For to love friendship, it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future. And there is no more just category for the future than that of the ‘perhaps’. Such a thought conjoins friendship, the future, and the perhaps to open on to the coming of what comes – that is to say, necessarily in the regime of a possible whose possibilization must prevail over the impossible. For a possible that would only be possible (non-impossible), a possible surely and certainly possible, accessible in advance, would be a poor possible, a futureless possible, a possible already set aside, so to speak, life-assured. This would be a programme or a causality, a development, a process without an event.

The possibilization of the impossible possible must remain at one and the same time as undecidable – and therefore as decisive – as the future itself. What would a future be if the decision were able to be programmed, and if the risk [l’aléa], the uncertainty, the unstable certainty, the inassurance of the ‘perhaps’, were not suspended on it at the opening of what comes, flush with the event, within it and with an open heart? What would remain to come should the inassurance, the limited assurance of the perhaps, not hold its breath in an ‘epoch’, to allow what is to come to appear or come – in order to open up, precisely, a concatenation of causes and effects, by necessarily disjoining a certain necessity of order, by interrupting it and inscribing therein simply its possible interruption? This suspension, the imminence of an interruption, can be called the other, the revolution, or chaos; it is, in any case, the risk of an instability. The unstable or the unreliable is what Plato and Aristotle spoke of as that which is not bébaios (not firm, constant, sure and certain, reliable, credible, faithful). Whether in its ultimate or minimal form, the instability of the unreliable always consists in not consisting, in eluding consistency and constancy, presence, permanence or substance, essence or existence, as well as any concept of truth which might be associated with them. This inconsistency and/or inconstancy is not an indetermination, but supposes a certain type of resolution and a singular exposition at the crossroads of chance and necessity. The unstable is as required here as its opposite, the stable or the reliable of constancy (bébaios), and is indispensable to the Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy of friendship. To think friendship with an open heart – that is, to think it as close as possible to its opposite – one must perhaps be able to think the perhaps, which is to say that one must be able to say it and to make of it, in saying it, an event: perhaps, vielleicht, perhaps – the English word refers more directly to chance (hap, perchance) and to the event of what may happen.⁵

Now we know that this thought of the perhaps – this one and not any other – does not occur anywhere or anyhow. Far from being a simple indetermination, the very sign of irresolution, it just so happens that it occurs to Nietzsche in the upheaval of a reversing catastrophe: not so as to settle the contradiction or to suspend the oppositions, but at the end of a case pressed against ‘the metaphysicians of all ages’, precisely at the point where they stop in their ‘typical prejudice’ and their ‘fundamental faith’ (Grundglaube) – the ‘faith in antithetical values’ (Glaube an the Gegensätze der Werthe)⁶ – at that point where they are unable to think their reversal or inversion: that is, the non-dialectical passage from one to the other. This they cannot think, it frightens them; they are not able to endure the contamination coming from what is beyond both antithetical values. Despite the value that must be accorded to the ‘true’ and to the ‘veracious’, it is altogether ‘possible’, ‘it might even be possible (es ware)’ that the very thing constitutive of the ‘value of good and honoured things’ – and virtue (areté) is one of them – is related, knotted, entangled (verwandt, verknupft, verhakelt) – perhaps (vielleicht) identical in its essence – (wesengleich) to its antithesis, to wicked things. ‘Perhaps!’ (Vielleicht!)

Before we even reach this exclamation, to this one-word phrase (Vielleicht!), a great number of perhapses have rained down. They have multiplied themselves in the writing of Nietzsche before becoming a theme, almost a name, perhaps a category. First of all in defining the ‘frog perspective’ to which Nietzsche compares metaphysics:

For it may be doubted, firstly whether there exist any antitheses at all, and secondly whether these popular evaluations and value-antitheses, on which the metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps (vielleicht) merely foreground valuations, merely provisional perspectives, perhaps (vielleicht) moreover the perspectives of a hole-and-corner, perhaps from below, as it were ‘frog-perspectives’ (Frosch-Perpecktiven gleichsam), to borrow an expression employed by painters.⁷

The transmutation to which Nietzsche submits the concept of virtue – sometimes, as has often been remarked,⁸ also in the Machiavellian sense of virtù – shudders in the tremor of this perhaps. In other words, in what is still to come, perhaps. This is something other than a reversal. The famous passage on ‘Our virtues’ (para. 214) from the same book turns resolutely towards us, towards ourselves, towards the ‘Europeans of the day after tomorrow’ that we are, and, first of all, towards the ‘first-born of the twentieth century’. It invites us, we the ‘last Europeans’, to be done with the pigtail and the wig of ‘good conscience’, the ‘belief in one’s own virtue (an seine eigne Tugend glauben)’. And here again, the shudder of the sentence, the shudder of an arrow of which it is still not known where and how far it will go, the vibration of a shaft of writing which, alone, promises and calls for a reading, a preponderance to come of the interpretative decision. We do not know exactly what is quivering here, but we perceive, in flight, at least a figure of the vibration. The prediction: ‘Alas! if only you knew how soon, how very soon, things will be – different! –’ (– Ach! Wenn ihr wuβtet, wie es bald, so bald schon – anders kommt!⁹).

What a sentence! Is it a sentence? Do we know that – that things will be different; and how very soon thing? will be different? Do we not already know that? Can that be measured by knowledge? If we knew that, things would no longer be different. We must not totally know this in order for a change to occur again. So, in order for this knowledge to be true, to know what it knows, a certain non-knowledge is necessary. But the non-knowledge of the one who says he knows that we do not know (‘Ah if you only knew’, a ploy or a figure which is neither a question nor an affirmation, not even a hypothesis, since you are going to know very soon, starting at the end of the sentence, that which you would know if you knew, and that therefore you already know: ‘Ah if you only knew!’) – to wit, what the person signing the said sentence (which is not a full sentence, but only an incomplete subordinate) cannot state without attributing to himself knowledge concerning what the other does not yet know, but already knows, having learned it in this instant – that is, instantaneously, and so soon (so bald) that it will not wait until the end of the sentence.

The acceleration in the change or the alteration which the sentence in suspension speaks (wie es bald, so bald schon – anders kommt!) is in truth only its very rapidity. An incomplete sentence rushes to its conclusion at the infinite speed of an arrow. The sentence speaks of itself, it gets carried away, precipitates and precedes itself, as if its end arrived before the end. Instantaneous teledromatics: the race is finished in advance, and this is future-producing. The circle is perhaps future-producing – this is what will have to be assumed, however impossible it may seem. As with what happens at every instant, the end begins, the sentence begins at the end. Infinite or nil speed, absolute economy, for the arrow carries its address along and implies in advance, in its very readability, the signature of the addressee. This is tantamount to saying that it withdraws from space by penetrating it. You have only to listen. It advances backwards; it outruns itself by reversing itself. It outstrips itself [elle se gagne de vitesse]. Here is an arrow whose flight would consist in a return to the bow: fast enough, in sum, never to have left it; and what the sentence says – its arrow – is withdrawn. It will nevertheless have reached us, struck home; it will have taken some time – it will, perhaps, have changed the order of the world even before we are able to awake to the realization that, in sum, nothing will have been said, nothing that will not already have been blindly endorsed in advance. And again, like a testament: for the natural miracle lies in the fact that such sentences outlive each author, and each specific reader, him, you and me, all of us, all the living, all the living presents.

By way of economy – and in order, in a single word, to formalize this absolute economy of the feint, this generation by joint and simultaneous grafting of the performative and the reportive, without a body of its own – let us call the event of such sentences, the ‘logic’ of this chance occurrence, its ‘genetics’, its ‘rhetoric’, its ‘historical record’, its ‘polities’, etc., teleiopoetic. Teleiopoiós qualifies, in a great number of contexts and semantic orders, that which renders absolute, perfect, completed, accomplished, finished, that which brings to an end. But permit us to play too with the other tele, the one that speaks to distance and the far-removed, for what is indeed in question here is a poetics of distance at one remove, and of an absolute acceleration in the spanning of space by the very structure of the sentence (it begins at the end, it is initiated with the signature of the other). Rendering, making, transforming, producing, creating – this is what counts; but, given that this happens only in the auto-tele-affection of the said sentence, in so far as it implies or incorporates its reader, one would – precisely to be complete – have to speak of auto-teleiopoetics. We shall say teleiopoetics for short, but not without immediately suggesting that friendship is implied in advance therein: friendship for oneself, for the friend and for the enemy. We all the more easily authorize ourselves to leave the self of the autos in the wings, since it appears here as the split effect rather than as the simple origin of teleiopoesis [téléiopoièse]. The inversion of repulsion into attraction is, in a way, engaged, analytically included, in the movement of phileîn. This is a logic that will have to be questioned: if there is no friend elsewhere than where the enemy can be, the ‘necessity of the enemy’ or the ‘one must love one’s enemies’ (seine Feinde lieben) straight away transforms enmity into friendship, etc. The enemies I love are my friends. So are the enemies of my friends. As soon as one needs or desires one’s enemies, only friends can be counted – this includes the enemies, and vice versa – and here madness looms. At each step, on the occasion of every teleiopoetic event. (No) more sense [Plus de sens]. That which is empty and that which overflows resemble one another, a desert mirage effect and the ineluctability of the event.

(Of course, we must quickly inform the reader that we will not follow Nietzsche here. Not in any simple manner. We will not follow him in order to follow him come what may. He never demanded such a thing anyway without freeing us, in the same move, from his very demand, following the well-known paradoxes of any fidelity. We will follow him here to the best of our ability in order, perhaps, to stop following him at one particular moment; and to stop following those who follow him – Nietzsche’s sons. Or those who still accompany him – to them we shall return much later – as his brothers or the brothers of his brothers. But this will be in order to continue, in his own way again, perhaps, turning the virtue of virtue against itself; to dig deeper under this ‘good conscience’ of the ‘last Europeans’ that continues to impel Nietzsche’s statements. This good conscience perhaps leaves on them a mark of the most unthought tradition – and the tradition of more than one tradition – all the way down to the overwhelming thought of friendship. This following without following will be undertaken in several stages, in varying rhythms, but it will also derive its authority from an avowal, however ironic it may be.

In ‘Our virtues’, Nietzsche continues to say ‘we’ in order to declare his appurtenance qua heir who still believes in his own virtues:

And is there anything nicer than to look for one’s own virtues? Does this not also mean: to believe in one’s own virtues? But this ‘believing in one’s virtue’ – is this not at bottom the same thing as that which one formerly called one’s ‘good conscience’, that venerable long conceptual pigtail which our grandfathers used to attach to the back of their heads and often enough to the back of their minds as well? It seems that, however little we may think ourselves old-fashioned and grand-fatherly-respectable in other respects, in one thing we are none the less worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, we last Europeans with a good conscience (wir letzsten Europaer mit gutem Gewissen): we too still wear their pigtail (ihren Zopf).’¹⁰

This good conscience of the last Europeans might well survive in Nietzsche’s head, beyond what he believes, what he thinks he believes, as well as in the heads of his ‘philosophers of a new species’: those who, in our century and beyond, have not broken any more radically than Nietzsche with the Greek or Christian canon of friendship – that is, with a certain politics, a certain type of democracy.)

These philosophers of a new species will accept the contradiction, the opposition or the coexistence of incompatible values. They will seek neither to hide this possibility nor to forget it; nor will they seek to surmount it. And this is where madness looms; but here, too, its urgency indeed calls for thought. In the same paragraph, Beyond Good and Evil opens our ears, and delivers the definition of the fool we need to understand the ‘living fool’ of Human All Too Human, such as he presents himself (I who shout, who exclaim, I the living fool, ruf ich, der lebende Τοr); at the very moment when he turns the address into its antithesis, when the friends become the enemies or when suddenly there are no more enemies. What in fact does Beyond Good and Evil say to us? That one must be mad, in the eyes of the ‘metaphysicians of all ages’, to wonder how something might (konnte) rise up out of its antithesis; to wonder if, for example, truth might be born of error, the will to truth or the will to deceive, the disinterested act of egotism, etc. How is one to ask a question of this kind without going mad? Such a genesis (Entstehung) of the antithesis would end up contradicting its very origin. It would be an anti-genesis. It would wage war on its own lineage, as the ‘metaphysician of all ages’ believes; this would be tantamount to a monstrous birth, an ‘impossible’ origin (‘Solcherlei Entstehung ist unmoglich’). Anyone who merely dreams of such a possibility (wer davon traumt) immediately goes mad; this is already a fool (ein Narr). Here we have yet another way of defining, from the impossible thought of this impossible, both the direct lineage and the dream – and its madness.

Perhaps! (Vielleicht!) But who is willing to concern himself with such dangerous perhapses! For that we have to await the arrival of a new species of philosopher (einer neuen Gattung von Philosophen), one which possesses tastes and inclinations opposite to and different from (umgekehrten) those of its predecessors – philosophers of the dangerous ‘perhaps’ (Philosophen des gefahrlichen Vielleicht) in every sense. – And to speak in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers arising (Ich sehe solche neue Philosophen heraufkommen).¹¹

Nietzsche renews the call; he puts through – from a different place – this teleiopoetic or telephone call to philosophers of a new species. To those of us who already are such philosophers, for in saying that he sees them coming, in saying they are coming, in feigning to record their coming (further on: Eine neue Gattung von Philosophen kommt herauf¹²), he is calling, he is asking, in sum, ‘that they come’ in the future. But to be able to say this, from the standpoint of the presumed signer, these new philosophers – from the standpoint of what is being written, from where we (Nietzsche and his followers) are writing to one another – must already have arrived. Nietzsche makes the call with an apostrophe to his addressee, asking him to join up with ‘us’, with this ‘us’ which is being formed, to join us and to resemble us, to become the friends of the friends that we are! Strange friends. What are we doing, in fact, we the friends that we are, we who are calling for new philosophers, we who are calling you to resemble and to join up with us in shared enjoyment (Mitfreude, this is what ‘makes the friend’; macht den Freund, as we read elsewhere,¹³Mitfreude and not Mitleiden, joy among friends, shared enjoyment [jouissance] and not shared suffering)? What are we doing and who are we, we who are calling you to share, to participate and to resemble? We are first of all, as friends, the friends of solitude, and we are calling on you to share what cannot be shared: solitude. We are friends of an entirely different kind, inaccessible friends, friends who are alone because they are incomparable and without common measure, reciprocity or equality. Therefore, without a horizon of recognition. Without a familial bond, without proximity, without oikeiótēs.

Without truth? We should wait and see. What truth is there for a friendship without proximity, without presence, therefore without resemblance, without attraction, perhaps even without significant or reasonable preference? How can such a friendship even be possible, except in a figure? Why still call this ‘friendship’ except in a misuse of language and a diversion of a semantic tradition? How could we not only be the friends of solitude, born friends (gebomen), sworn friends (geschwomen), jealous friends of solitude (eifersuchtigen Freunde der Einsamkeit), but then invite you to become a member of this singular community?

How many of us are there? Does that count? And how do you calculate?

Thus is announced the anchoritic community of those who love in separation [who love to stand aloof: qui aiment à s’éloigner]. The invitation comes to you from those who can love only at a distance, in separation [qui n’aiment qu’ à se séparer au loin]. This is not all they love, but they love; they love lovence, they love to love – in love or in friendship – providing there is this withdrawal. Those who love only in cutting ties are the uncompromising friends of solitary singularity. They invite you to enter into this community of social disaggregation [déliaison], which is not necessarily a secret society, a conjuration, the occult sharing of esoteric or crypto-poetic knowledge. The classical concept of the secret belongs to a thought of the Community, solidarity or the sect – initiation or private space which represents the very thing the friend who speaks to you as a friend of solitude has rebelled against.

How can this be? Is it not a challenge to good sense and to sense tout court? Is it possible?

It is perhaps impossible, as a matter of fact. Perhaps the impossible is the only possible chance of something new, of some new philosophy of the new. Perhaps; perhaps, in truth, the perhaps still names this chance. Perhaps friendship, if there is such a thing, must honour [faire droit] what appears impossible here. Let us, then, underscore once again the perhaps (vielleicht) of a sentence, the one ending the second section of Beyond Good and Evil, entitled ‘The free spirit’ (para. 44).

After the ‘frog perspective’, with the eye of the toad – on the same side but also on the other – we have the eye of the owl, an eye open day and night, like a ghost in the immense Nietzschean bestiary; but here too, above all, we have the scarecrow, the disquieting simulacrum, the opposite of a decoy: an artifact in rags and tatters, an automaton to frighten birds – the Vogelscheuchen that we are and should be in the world of today, if we are to save, with madness and with singularity itself the friendship of the solitary and the chance to come of a new philosophy. We shall focus on a moment of this clamour – only the conclusion of this long-winded [au long souffle] address. It should be allowed to ring out in a loud voice in its entirety, and in its original language. In the light of the night, for this solitude of which we are jealous is that of ‘midday and midnight’. Before quoting these few lines, let us recall, however, that this passage begins with an attack on a certain concept of the free spirit, of free thought. Nietzsche denounces the freethinkers, the levellers with their enslaved pens – in the service not of democracy, as they sometimes claim, but of ‘democratic taste’ and, in quotation marks, ‘modern ideas’. It is out of the question to oppose some non-freedom to the freedom of these free spirits (since they are in truth slaves); only additional freedom. These philosophers of the future (diese Philosophen der Zukunft) that Nietzsche says are coming will also be free spirits, ‘very free’ spirits (freie, sehr freie Geister). But through this superlative and this surplus of freedom, they will also be something greater and other, something altogether other, fundamentally other (Grundlich-Anderes). As for what will be fundamentally other, I will say that the philosophers of the future will be at once both its figure and its responsibility (although Nietzsche does not put it in this way). Not because they will come, if they do, in the future, but because these philosophers of the future already are philosophers capable of thinking the future, of carrying and sustaining the future – which is to say, for the metaphysician allergic to the perhaps, capable of enduring the intolerable, the undecidable and the terrifying. Such philosophers already exist, something like the Messiah (for the teleiopoesis we are speaking of is a messianic structure) whom someone addresses, here and now, to inquire when he will come.¹⁴ We are not yet among these philosophers of the future, we who are calling them and calling them the philosophers of the future, but we are in advance their friends and, in this gesture of the call, we establish ourselves as their heralds and precursors (ihre Herolde und Vorlaufer).

This precursivity does not stop at the premonitory sign. It already engages a bottomless responsibility, a debt whose sharing out [partage] is differentiated enough to warrant a prudent analysis. Nietzsche sometimes says ‘I’ and sometimes ‘we’. The signatory of the precursory discourses addressed to you is sometimes me, sometimes us – that is, a community of solitary friends, friends ‘jealous of solitude’, jealous of their ‘proper and profound solitude of midday-midnight’ who call other friends to come.

This is perhaps the ‘community of those without community’.¹⁵

But the declared responsibility, the Schuldigkeit thus named, is mine, that of the person saying I. It says, I say, I must answer at the same time before the philosophers of the future to come (before them), before the spectre of those who are not yet here, and before the philosophers of the future that we (we) already are, we who are already capable of thinking the future or the coming of philosophers of the future. A double responsibility which doubles up again endlessly: I must answer for myself or before myself by answering for us and before us. I/we must answer for the present we for and before the we of the future, while presently addressing myself to you, and inviting you to join up with this ‘us’ of which you are already but not yet a member. At the end of the teleiopoetic sentence you, readers, may have already become, nevertheless, the cosignatories of the addresses addressed to you, providing, at least, that you have heard it, which you are invited to do to the best of your ability – which thus remains your absolutely and irreplaceably singular responsibility.

This is a double but infinite responsibility, infinitely redoubled, split in two [dé-doublée], shared and parcelled out; an infinitely divided responsibility, disseminated, if you will, for one person, for only one – all alone (this is the condition of responsibility) – and a bottomless double responsibility that implicitly describes an intertwining of temporal ekstases; a friendship to come of time with itself where we meet again the interlacing of the same and the altogether other (‘Grundlich-Anderes’) which orientates us in this labyrinth. The to-come precedes the present, the self-presentation of the present; it is, therefore, more ‘ancient’ than the present, ‘older’ than the past present. It thus chains itself to itself while unchaining itself at the same time; it disjoins itself, and disjoins the self that would yet join itself in this disjunction.

Shall we say that this responsibility which inspires (in Nietzsche) a discourse of hostility towards ‘democratic taste’ and ‘modem ideas’ is exercised against democracy in general, modernity in general; or that, on the contrary, it responds in the name of a hyperbole of democracy or modernity to come, before it, prior to its coming – a hyperbole for which the ‘taste’ and ‘ideas’ would be, in this Europe and this America then named by Nietzsche, but the mediocre caricatures, the talkative good conscience, the perversion and the prejudice – the ‘misuse of the term’ democracy? Do not these lookalike caricatures – and precisely because they resemble it – constitute the worst enemy of what they resemble, whose name they have usurped? The worst repression, the very repression which one must, as close as possible to the analogy, open and literally unlock?

(Let us leave this question suspended, it breathes the perhaps’, and the perhaps to come will always have anticipated the question. It is a subsidiary question, always late and secondary. At the moment of its formation, a perhaps will have opened it up. A perhaps will perhaps always forbid its closing, where it is in the very act of forming. No response, no responsibility, will ever abolish the perhaps. The perhaps must open and precede, once and for all, the questioning it suspends in advance – not to neutralize or inhibit, but to make possible all the determined and determining orders that depend on questioning (research, knowledge, science and philosophy, logic, law, politics and ethics, and in general language itself): this is a necessity to which we are attempting to do justice in several ways.

For example:

1. By recalling this acquiescence (Zusage) more originary than the question which, without saying yes to anything positive, can affirm the possibility of the future only by opening itself up to determinability, thus by welcoming what still remains undetermined and indeterminable. It is indeed A perhaps that cannot as yet be determined as dubitative or sceptical,¹⁶ the perhaps of what remains to be thought, to be done, to be lived (to death). Now this perhaps not only comes ‘before’ the question (investigation, research, knowledge, theory, philosophy); it would come, in order to make it possible, ‘before’ the originary acquiescence which engages the question in advance with [auprès de] the other.

2. By specifying recurrently: ‘if there is one’, by suspending the thesis of existence wherever, between a concept and an event, the law of an aporia, an undecidability, a double bind occurs in interposition, and must in truth impose itself to be endured there. This is the moment when the disjunction between thinking and knowing becomes crucial. This is the moment when one can think sense or non-sense only by ceasing to be sure that the thing ever occurs, or – even if there is such a thing – that it would ever be accessible to theoretical knowledge or determinant judgement, any assurance of discourse or of nomination in general. Thus we regularly say – but we could multiply the examples – the gift, if there is one; invention, if there is any such thing,¹⁷ and so forth. This does not amount to conceding a hypothetical or conditional dimension (‘if, supposing that, etc.’) but to marking a difference between ‘there is’ and ‘is’ or ‘exists’ – that is to say, the words of presence. What there is, if there is one or any, is not necessarily. It perhaps does not exist nor ever present itself; nevertheless, there is one, or some; there is a chance of there being one, of there being some. Perhaps – although the French peut-être is, perhaps, with its two verbs (pouvoir and Are), too rich. Would not the original possibility we are discussing efface itself better in the adverbs of other languages (vielleicht or perhaps, for example)?

I underscore, then, we underscore – more precisely we, in turn, re-mark what the I itself (Nietzsche, if you like), will have underlined: its responsibility, the obligation to answer, the responsibility which consists in calling as much as in responding to the call, and always in the name of a singular solitude, proper solitude, solitude strictly speaking. In the name of the friend jealous of his solitude, jealous of his secret without secret. Let us then remark, too, the flexions and reflections of personal pronouns, between I, they, we and you: I feel responsible towards them (the new thinkers who are coming), therefore responsible before us who announce them, therefore towards us who are already what we are announcing and who must watch over that very thing, therefore towards and before you whom I call to join us, before and towards me who understands all this and who is before it all: me, them, us, you, etc.

But in saying this I feel I have a duty (I feel I have the responsibility, the debt or the duty: fuhle ich … die Schuldigkeit), almost as much towards them as towards us, their heralds and precursors, us free spirits! – to blow away from all of us an ancient and stupid prejudice and misunderstanding which has all too long obscured the concept ‘free spirit’ like a fog. In all the countries of Europe and likewise in America there exists at present something that misuses this name, a very narrow, enclosed, chained up species of spirits who desire practically the opposite of that which informs our aims and instincts – not to mention the fact that in regard to those new philosophers appearing (heraufkommenden neuen Philosophen) they must certainly be closed windows and bolted doors. They belong, in short and regrettably, among the levellers (Nivellirer), these falsely named ‘free spirits’ – eloquent and tirelessly scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modem ideas’, men without solitude one and all, without their own solitude (allesammt Menschen ohne Einsamkeit, ohne eigne Einsamkeit), good clumsy fellows who, while they cannot be denied courage and moral respectability, are unfree and ludicrously superficial, above all in their fundamental inclination to see in the forms of existing society the cause of practically all human failure and misery: which is to stand the truth happily on its head! (wobei the Wahrheit glucklich auf den Kopf zu stehn kommt!) What with all their might they would like to strive after is the universal green pasture happiness of the herd, with security, safety (Sicherheit, Ungefahrlichkeit), comfort and an easier life for all; their two most oft-recited doctrines and ditties are ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’ – and suffering itself they take for something that has to be abolished. We, who are the opposite of this … [we think that] everything evil, dreadful, tyrannical, beast of prey and serpent in man serves to enhance the species man (der species Mensch).¹⁸

And here, once again, a ‘perhaps’ arrives to spread disquiet in the opposition itself. The perhaps carries away the extreme alterity, the possibility of this other end, this other term which structures no less the antidemocratic provocation, and results in there never being ‘enough to say’ or ‘enough to silence’:

We do not say enough when we say even that much, and at any rate we are, in what we say and do not say on this point, at the other end (at the altogether other end, Nietzsche’s emphasis: am andern Ende) from all modern ideology and herd desiderata: as its antipodes perhaps (als deren Antipoden vielleicht)?

At each instant the discourse is carried out to its limit, on the edge of silence: it transports itself beyond itself. It is swept away by the extreme opposition – indeed, the alterity – by the hyperbole which engages it in an infinite build-up [surenchère] (freer than the freedom of the free spirit, a better democrat than the crowd of modem democrats, aristocrat among all democrats, more futural and futurist than the modem), swept away by the perhaps that arrives to undecide meaning at each decisive moment.

All this (this surplus of democracy, this excess of freedom, this reaffirmation of the future) is not, so we suspect, very promising for the community, communication, the rules and maxims of communicational action. Nietzsche continues, in effect:

Is it any wonder we ‘free spirits’ are not precisely the most communicative of spirits (die mitteilsamsten Geister)? that we do not want to betray in every respect from what (wovon) a spirit can free itself and to what (wohin) it is then perhaps driven? And as for the dangerous formula ‘beyond good and evil’ with which we at any rate guard against being taken for what we are not: we are something different (wir sind etwas Anders) from ‘libres-penseurs’, ‘liben pensatori,#x2019;, Freidenket’, or whatever else all these worthy advocates of ‘modern ideas’ like to call themselves.¹⁹

And now, for the finishing touch, the owls in full light of day – ourselves again – the scarecrows that we owe it to ourselves to be today; friendship without friendship of the friends of solitude, the surplus of free will, and once again the perhaps in which I see you coming, you, the arrivants to come, you the arrivant thinkers, you the coming, the upcoming (das Kommenden), the new philosophers, but you whom I see coming, me, I who am already perhaps a little like you who are perhaps a little like us, a bit on our side, you the new philosophers, my readers to come, who will be my readers only if you become new philosophers – that is, if you know how to read me – in other words, if you can think what I write in my stead, and if you know how to countersign in advance or how to prepare yourself to countersign, always in imminent fashion, what you inspire in me here exactly, teleiopoetically:

curious to the point of vice, investigators to the point of cruelty, with rash fingers for the ungraspable, with teeth and stomach for the most indigestible, ready for every task that demands acuteness and sharp senses, ready for every venture thanks to a superfluity of ‘free will’ (dank einen Uberschusse von ‘freiem Willen’), with fore-and back-souls into whose ultimate intenions no one can easily see, with fore-and backgrounds to whose end no foot may go, hidden under mantles of light, conquerors even though we look like heirs and prodigals, collectors and arrangers from morn till night, misers of our riches and our full-crammed cupboards, thrifty in learning and forgetting, inventive in schemata, sometimes proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night owls of labour even in broad daylight (mitunter Nachteulen der Arbeit auch am hellen Tage); yes, even scarecrows when we need to be – and today we need to be: in so far, that is, as we are born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of our own deepest, most midnight, most midday solitude (unserer eignen tiefsten mitternachtlichsten, mittaglichsten Einsamkeit) – such a type of man are we, we free spirits! and perhaps you too are something of the same type, you coming men? you new philosophers? (und vielleicht seid auch ihr etwas davon, ihr Kommenden? ihr neuen Philosophen? –) {Nietzsche’s emphasis}.²⁰

Community without community, friendship without the community of the friends of solitude. No appurtenance. Nor resemblance nor proximity. The end of oikeiótēs? Perhaps. We have here, in any case, friends seeking mutual recognition without knowing each other. One who calls and questions oneself is not even sure that the new philosophers will be part of the free spirits that we are. The rupture will perhaps be radical, even more radical. Perhaps those whom I am calling will be unrecognizable enemies. In any case, I am not asking them to be like me, like us, as the French translation we have quoted puts it. Friends of solitude: this must be understood in multiple fashion: they love solitude, they belong together – that is their resemblance, in a world of solitude, of isolation, of singularity, of non-appurtenance. But in this singular world of singularities, these ‘sworn friends of solitude’ are conjurers; they are even called to be conjurers by one of the heralds, the one who says I but is not necessarily the first, though he is one of the first in our twentieth century to speak this community without community.

To speak to it and thereby – let us not hesitate to clarify this – to form or to forge it. And to do so in the language of madness that we must use, forced, all of us, by the most profound and rigorous necessity, to say things as contradictory, insane, absurd, impossible, undecidable as ‘X without X’, ‘community of those without community’, ‘inoperative community’, ‘unavowable community’: these untenable syntagms and arguments – illegible, of course, and even derisive – these inconceivable concepts exposed to the disdain of philosophical good conscience, which thinks it possible to hold out in the shade of the Enlightenment; where the light of the Enlightenment is not thought, where a heritage is misappropriated. For us there is no Enlightenment other than the one to be thought.

This secretless conjuration plots itself between day and night, between midday and midnight, in the risk of the perhaps – that is, in the already incalculable anticipation of this risk, this thought of risk which will be characteristic of the new philosophy. This already of the perhaps acts. We have already undergone the effects of its action; we have this in memory, do we not? It acts within itself – in immanent fashion, we will say – although this immanence consists too in leaving self. Leaving oneself as of oneself, which can be done only by letting the other come, which is possible only if the other precedes and informs me – only if the other is the condition of my immanence. Very strong and very feeble, the already of the perhaps has the paradoxical force of a teleiopoetic propulsion. Teleiopoesis makes the arrivants come – or rather, allows them to come – by withdrawing; it produces an event, sinking into the darkness of a friendship which is not yet.

Autobiographical as it remains in the circular movement of its arrow, a boomerang that none the less relentlessly pursues its progress towards changing the place of the subject, teleiopoesis also defines the general structure of political allocution, its lure and its truth. We have indeed come into a certain politics of friendship. Into ‘great polities’, not into the one with which the political scientists and the politicians (sometimes too the citizens of modern democracy) entertain us: the politics of opinion.

For one should not believe that our perhaps belongs to a regime of opinion. That would be a case of credulousness – just an opinion, and a poor one at that. Our unbelievable perhaps does not signify haziness and mobility, the confusion preceding knowledge or renouncing all truth. If it is undecidable and without truth in its own moment (but it is, as a matter of fact, difficult to assign a proper moment to it), this is in order that it might be a condition of decision, interruption, revolution, responsibility and truth. The friends of the perhaps are the friends of truth. But the friends of truth are not, by definition, in the truth; they are not installed there as in the padlocked security of a dogma and the stable reliability of an opinion. If there is some truth in the perhaps, it can only be that of which the friends are the friends. Only friends. The friends of truth are without the truth, even if friends cannot function without truth. The truth – that of the thinkers to come – it is impossible to be it, to be there, to have it; one must only be its friend. This also means one must be solitary – and jealous of one’s retreat. This is the anchoritic truth of this truth. But it is far from abstaining from afar from the political – and even if the anchorite plays the scarecrow, such a person overpoliticizes the space of the city.

Hence this remarkable redoubling of the perhaps (this time in the form of ‘in all probability’, wahrscheinlich genug) which responds to the question of knowing if, on their way or in the imminence of their arrival, the thinkers to come are ‘friends of the truth’. These friends of the truth that they will, perhaps, remain begin by denouncing a fundamental contradiction, that which no politics will be able to explain or rationalize, simply because it neither can nor has the right to do so: the contradiction inhabiting the very concept of the common and the community. For the common is rare, and the common measure is, a rarity for the rare, just as, not far from here, Baudelaire’s man of the crowds thought it. How many of them are there? How many of us are there? The incalculable equality of these friends of solitude, of the incommensurable subjects, of these subjects without subject and without intersubjectivity.

How can a democrat handle this friendship, this truth, this contradiction? And this measurelessness? I mean the democrat whom we know so well, who is really not familiar with such things? Above all, he is unfamiliar with the practice of putting ‘truth’ in quotation marks.

Let us listen, then. And first let us put into the present what the standard French translation deemed it necessary to render in a future tense. Those who are the future are on their way, now, even if these arrivants have not yet arrived: their present is not present, it is not in current affairs, but they are coming, they are arrivants because they are going to come. ‘Ils seront’ means: they are what is going to come, and what is to come is in the present tense; it speaks (in French) to the presentation of the future, sometimes planned, sometimes prescribed. In paragraph 43 of Beyond Good and Evil, the truth of these friends seems to be suspended between quotation marks:

Are they new friends of ‘truth’ (and not, as in the French translation, seront-ils, [will they be], Sind es neue Freunde der ‘Wahrheit), these coming philosophers (diese kommenden Philosophen)? In all probability ([c’est assez vraisemblable {ou probable}], Wahrscheinlich genug, the French translations give here ‘probably’, thus losing this allusion to the true; for this response to the question of truth, of friendship for the truth, cannot be true or certain, certainly, it can only have a true-semblance [vrai-semblance], but already orientated by friendship for the truth): for all philosophers have hitherto loved their truths.

I have underlined hitherto (bisher): we will come across its import again later. Their truths – theirs, without quotation marks this time – this is what the philosophers have loved. Is this not contradictory with truth itself? But if one must love truth (this is necessary, is it not?), how will one love anything other than one’s own truth, a truth that one can appropriate? Nietzsche’s answer (but how will a democrat handle it?): far from being the very form of truth, universalization hides the cunning of all dogmatisms. Being-common or being-in-common: a dogmatic stratagem, the cunning of the common sense of the community; what is placed in common can reason [raisonner] only in order to frame or set [arraisonner]. And as for the apparently arithmetical question, the question of the number of friends in which we have begun to perceive the Aristotelian dimension – the question of great numbers qua the political question of truth – we shall see that it does not fail to crop up here:

for all philosophers have hitherto loved their truths (ihre Wahrheiten). But certainly (Sicherlich aber) they will not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, and also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for everyman, which has hitherto (emphasis added) been the secret desire and hidden sense (Hintersinn) of all dogmatic endeavours. ‘My judgement is my judgement: another cannot easily acquire a right to it’ – such a philosopher of the future may perhaps (vielleicht, once again) say. One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many (mit Vielen ubereinstimmen zu wollen). ‘Good’ is no longer good when your neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there exist a ‘common good’ (‘Gemeingut’)!. The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little value. In the end it must be as it is and has always been: great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders (Schuder, also shivers or quivers or thrills) and delicacies (Zartheiten, also fragilities and weaknesses, etc.) for the refined (Feinen, the delicate, the subtle, the weak also, the vulnerable, for the aristocracy of this truth of election is both that of force and weakness, a certain manner of being able to be hurt), and, in sum (tm ganzin und kurzen), all rare things for the rare.²¹

So that is what this philosopher of the future will say, perhaps. That, perhaps, is what he would say, the friend of truth – but a mad truth, the mad friend of a truth which ignores both the common and common sense (‘I, the living fool’), the friend of a ‘truth’ in quotation marks that reverses all the signs in one stroke.