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Full Dorsal: Derrida's Politics of Friendship
David Wills
University at Albany, State University of New York
DWills@uamail.albany.edu
(c) 2005 David Wills.
All rights reserved.
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. . . and after the telephone call, I will turn my back on you
to sleep, as usual, and you will curl up against me, giving me
your hand, you will envelop me.
Jacques Derrida, The Post Card
The first version of this essay was written for a conference on
Derrida's Politics of Friendship sponsored by SUNY-Stony Brook in
New York in November 2002. As fate would have it, that was the
last occasion I saw Jacques Derrida before he fell ill, watching
him back away down 6th Avenue, slightly bowing as he stretched out
his arm to wave in his very personal and personable manner, as if
he never wanted to be the first to turn and walk away. I could not
have known then what sort of definitive "back" he would have
turned towards us by the time my words found their way into print,
even though the fact of mortality is readable in everything he
wrote, and especially in Politics of Friendship. What I did know,
and what enlivens the memory of him in the wake of his death, was
the experience of a friendship in practice, upright and supportive
from start to finish. This is dedicated to that memory.
1. What sense could one give to the idea of a friendship against
nature? We can imagine friendships that might be deemed unworthy
of the name because something in them betrays the very positivity
we ascribe to amity: the friendship of rogues, an unholy alliance,
or a friendship of convenience. We could also imagine a friendship
that demeans for one reason or another, or a friendship that is
excessive according to this or that norm or expectation, and so is
considered reprehensible. We could even imagine what some might
consider an unhealthy relation between human and animal (he spends
all his time with his dog), or human and machine (she spends all
her time with her car), and although in the latter case we might
be getting closer to what I am trying to have us imagine, it would
still be a matter of the various moral rights of inspection by
which what is supposed proper to friendship is controlled and
determined. What I am asking us to imagine is instead a friendship
that would be unnatural in its very conception, a concept of
friendship that did not suppose it to issue from a beating heart,
or some seat of emotion. In short a friendship artificially
conceived or produced, what we might call a prosthetic friendship.
2. Supposedly no such thing exists. Its possibility is certainly not
entertained by the various philosophical discourses on friendship
that are the objects of Derrida's analysis in Politics of
Friendship. Friendship, it seems, is systematically an affair of
the natural and of the living. An unnatural friendship could only
be conceived of as an immoral friendship, an uneconomical or
wasteful one, but which in no way impugns the vital originary
force of its /pathos/, its /pneumaticity./ However, as soon as
friendship becomes a matter of politics, something it appears
always already to be in its philosophical conception and therefore
something that the conceit and title, not to mention the analyses,
of Derrida's book point to, then everything is otherwise. Indeed,
it could be argued that it is precisely an unnatural friendship
that Derrida promotes once he evokes "a deconstruction of the
genealogical schema . . . . to think and live a politics, a
friendship, a justice which /begin/ by breaking with their
naturalness or their homogeneity, with their alleged place of
origin" (Politics 105).[1 <#foot1>] The deconstruction and
originary rupture he has in mind in that context have to do with
the thinking and implementation of another politics or democracy,
and not with my idea of deconstituting a concept of friendship
that is limited to the living, but clearly a friendship that is
also a politics has in some way been /impersonalized/ if not
/depersonalized./ It has gone public or become something like a
business relationship in a way that exceeds or acts in competition
with what we naïvely understand friendship to be. Perhaps, in
fact, the very question of friendship is a problematics of the
relation between public and private space, that whereas amorous
and familial relations are conceived of as private, and economic
and political as public, friendship functions across the border
separating private from public. What I am suggesting in any case
is that a friendship that is always already "corrupted" by, say, a
politics that is presumed to function outside of it, also raises
the question of its supposed originary naturality. If friendship
partakes of politics, would not the naturality that founds it also
be seen to enter into a relation with some form of unnaturality?
3. Let me add another set of questions. What would such an unnatural
friendship look like? What does any friendship look like? What is
its phenomenological representativity, or appresentativity? How do
we know that such a thing exists, and what would the sense of it
be, outside of its performance: outside of a frequentation (seeing
two people, say, corresponding or keeping company), or outside of
an exchange (of embraces, of gestures, of tokens, and so on)? Not
that a secret friendship isn't possible, but we would have to
presume its very secrecy to be a function of its performativity.
That is to say, the very effects of its secrecy would have to be
negotiated in view of the fact that most friends show signs of
affection; one could keep a friendship private only by
scrupulously avoiding the public, one could keep it secret only by
scrupulously declining to show the signs of it, by /performing the
non-performance of the signs of friendship/, which is not the same
as /not performing the signs of friendship/ in the way that
non-friends do. Furthermore, how would a phenomenology of
friendship be distinguished from or opposed to that of something
called love or passion? Is there a figure for friendship analogous
to, but distinguishable from, what exists in a relation of
passion, analogous to but distinguishable from the act of love,
lovemaking, the carnal embrace? Or is it rather that friendship
acts like a "preliminary" subset of the carnal, with looks,
smiles, touching, embraces, and so on, but stopping before it gets
to certain types of kiss and all the rest? If the carnal includes
all the signs of friendship (and much more), then does
friendship--at least to look at, the way we see it--have any
specificity other than that of a domesticated or controlled
carnality?
4. If Politics of Friendship inscribes an originary heterogeneity in
friendship in order to argue for a different genealogizing of it,
and so of politics; if, in terms of its argument, friendship needs
to be otherwise politicized, and politics otherwise structured in
terms of amity, then Derrida's book similarly raises questions
concerning the rigorous purity of the distinction between
friendship and love or friendship and the madness of passion.
While raising those questions, Derrida to a great extent respects
the tradition of the distinction; to do otherwise, he writes,
would involve an impossible analytical project ("it would take
another book" [221]). But his whole analysis comes and goes
between the two, via an extraordinarily complex configuration, as
I hope to show. One is left, in a sense, twisting and turning
between love and friendship, as between /philía/ and /eros/, and
it is difficult to know, in the final analysis, what it all adds
up to beyond the turning itself, beyond the torsion of a tropic
catastrophe through which one continues to hear the disembodied
voices of Diogenes, Laertius, Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne,
Nietzsche, Blanchot, and others, repeating something while no
longer knowing where they first heard it.
5. So if I were to go quickly towards the vantage point I want to
work from, I would contend that friendship presumes the figure of
an /inter-view/, a reciprocal perception, a face to face symmetry
whose inimical converse would be the back to back that initiates a
duel; and that within the same figural terms, a repoliticized
friendship, perhaps distinguishable from love but only
problematically so, would look like a dissymmetrical something,
back to front, dorsal rather than frontal. And yet it would only
be from the perspective of such a dorsality that a politics of and
for the technological age as we experience it could begin to
develop.[2 <#foot2>] Such a politics, a posthumanist politics as
it were, would seem, after all, to be the very wager of Politics
of Friendship.
6. It is thus a certain figurality--a word I will distinguish from
"positionality"--of love and friendship, sex and politics, that I
want to entertain in what follows. Roland Barthes described his
fragments of a lover's discourse as choreographic figures, "to be
understood, not in [their] rhetorical sense, but rather in [their]
gymnastic or choreographic acceptation . . . . the body's gesture
caught in action" (1-2). I will argue that, short of a /thesis/,
there is a type of /choreography/ to be drawn out of the relations
between politics and friendship in Derrida's discussion, a series
of turns that articulate a complicated figural or figurative set
of gestures. It is as if, in looking at friendship as it
articulates with politics, we see certain corporeal gestures or
movements; as if there were complicated turns of amicable
discourse deriving as much from friendship's relation to the
political as from its relation to the carnal, turns that imply and
implicate, therefore, both a rhetoric and an erotics. What follows
will play across the love/friendship distinction in pointing
towards a figure, or set of figures common to both and yet without
being in any way inimical to the lines of argument that are
developed and the distinctions that are drawn in Politics of
Friendship. This will involve a torsion of those arguments, a
turning or /détournement/, something of a diverting of them, yet
still within the context of a re-con-figuration, a particular
rearrangement and perspectival shift.
7. Turning is explicit from the beginning of Politics of Friendship;
one of its major chapters is entitled "Recoils,"[3 <#foot3>] and
by the end, with Blanchot's formulation of a friendship of
abandon(ment) through death (301-2), the choreographic sense of it
has been developed far enough to suggest that friendship involves
turning one's back. Thus if there is to be a figure for
distinguishing friend from enemy, beyond or this side of Schmitt's
reliance for that on the constant possibility of war (cf.
/Politics/ 130), it will be the gesture of turning one's back, a
politics of friendship as /dorsality./ It would be a choreographic
instance that looks neither like a breaking-off of
negotiations--walking away from talking, the end of diplomacy that
for Schmitt doesn't exist since it gets continued by means of
war--nor like turning the other cheek, which can occur only after
friendship has foundered on an initial act of violence. And if I
am still insisting on a visual version or phenomenality of that
gesture, it would be because it takes place only once friendship
has broken out of the circuit of the sentimental, out of the
self-enclosure of its privacy, become political and--this is my
insistence--become technological. Such a turning of the back would
be the figure for a particular fiduciary relation in the world,
the trust that it implies, its presumption of non-enmity,
something functioning beyond an economics of appropriation, within
the /an/economics and /ana/logic of the "/perhaps/" that is the
opening to a hospitality of radical otherness promoted by Derrida
throughout his discussion.
8. In order to configure the question of friendship as a hypothesis
about turning one's back, about "facing" back to front, where
"hypothesis" is itself understood in the similarly choreographic
sense of a turning towards a positionality, we will need to work
through the complicated rhetorico-philosophico-political
formulations, and compounding abyssal enfoldings and reversals of
Politics of Friendship. For, as Derrida makes explicit in the
first of the many parenthetical insertions within his text that
will ultimately become the focus of my reading, in "striving to
speak . . . in the logic of [Aristotle] . . . doing everything
that seems possible to respect the conceptual veins of his
argumentation," one finds oneself changing the tone and embarking
upon "some slow, discreet or secret drift" that is undecidably
"conceptual, logical or properly philosophical" rather than
"psychological, rhetorical or poetic" (13).
9. A first set of rhetorico-conceptual junctures in Politics of
Friendship may be identified simply as turns, beginning with the
pivotal role given to that epigraph of doubtful origin--"O my
friends, there is no friend"--and with the epigraph itself. The
reader is led through versions the motto borrows in context after
context and from the pen of writer after writer. As Derrida
emphasizes, this maxim by means of which friendship is analyzed is
a trope (a rhetorical "detour") that is itself a turning. "O my
friends" constitutes an example of the figure called "apostrophe,"
that singular form of address that involves, as explained in the
preface to The Post Card, "a live interpellation (the man of
discourse or writing interrupts the continuous development of the
sequence, abruptly /turns/ toward someone, that is, something,
addresses himself to you)" (4); or, as repeated here: "this
impulse by means of which I /turn/ towards the singularity of the
other, towards you, the irreplaceable one" (5, emphases added).[4
<#foot4>]
10. However, "O my friends, there is no friend" in turn turns within
itself. It has the form of a chiasmus, whose two parts intersect
by means of a reverse impulse. The end of the saying comes around
and back to meet its middle, creating an imperfect symmetry, such
that it could be rewritten "O my friends, friend there is none."
But this chiasmic structure, that of a folding back, gets
compounded once Derrida draws attention to the alternative version
of the expression, where the initial omega of the Greek "original"
is accented to shift from the simple vocative interjection of an
address to "my friends," to a dative. "O my friends" thus becomes
something like "he for whom there are (many) friends," and the
full sentence shifts to mean "he who has (many) friends can have
no true friend." Derrida nicknames the latter version the /repli/
(209), translated as "recoil," which is one of its senses, but
which loses the nuance that matters to me here, that of a folding
back or turning in upon itself. "Recoil" does, however, suggest
the somewhat vertiginous series of twists (Derrida will later call
it a "zigzag" [221]) along which the motto is deployed throughout
the 200-odd pages of analysis.
11. To summarize: a trope (rhetorical /turn/) that is an apostrophe
(/turn/ to a single addressee) borrows the form of a chiasmus (a
syntagm that /turns/ back on itself) whose exact version (L.
/vertere/, "to /turn/") is uncertain, potentially di/vert/ing or
turning its sense, or at least creating a further turn or chiasmus
(Derrida's word, 213) between its two forms. But what is all the
more telling about the attention given to the alternate rendition
and reading of the "O my friends" maxim is, it seems to me, the
reflective and almost cautious manner in which Derrida introduces
it, the explicit reference he makes to the rhetorical ploy or
gesture that he is thereby advancing. I am referring simply, for
the moment, to the /fact/ of that reflection and caution--I will
later return to examine their /substance/--and to the gestures of
rhetorical, exegetical, and scriptural intervention that they
represent as yet another turn in the abyssal layerings that
striate through the book. I mean that above and beyond his
"discovering" another version of the maxim, or his reading of that
version, Derrida pays particular metadiscursive attention to the
means by which his reading is being deployed. More on that shortly.
12. A second set of gestures in or movements of Derrida's text may be
characterized as reversals. However difficult it may be to
conceive of a pure linear movement, we nevertheless understand a
turn to be by definition disjunctive, a shift away from the
straightforward, and the chiasmus of "O my friends, there is no
friend" reinforces that. Derrida begins chapter one of Politics of
Friendship by emphasizing the /contretemps/ of the "two disjoined
members of the same unique sentence" (1). Such a /contretemps/
works against any reciprocality that the figure of the chiasmus
seems to imply. In spite of producing a type of symmetry,
necessarily imperfect except in the case of a palindrome, and in
any case given the two opposing directional movements, the
chiasmus involves a disjunctive force that allows, potentially at
least, for substitution and reversal. The folded back second half
of the syntagm sets itself up in competition with the first half,
overlaying what precedes and effectively having the last word.
Indeed, substitute and reverse is precisely what the maxim does,
the "no friend" of the second part substituting for and reversing
the "my friends" of the beginning.
13. More such reversals are to come. Aristotle, we read, breaks with
the reciprocality of friendship, its two-way traffic ("the
reciprocalist or /mutualist/ schema of requited friendship" [10])
to argue for a preference of loving over being loved (or liked).
Since one can be loved without knowing it, and since in general
terms it is better to be the active party, preference is given to
the one doing the loving, and this makes for what Derrida calls
"the necessary unilaterality of a dissymmetrical /phileîn/"
(23-24). Now while that perhaps says more about Aristotle's
conceptions of activity and passivity than about friendship
("Being-loved certainly speaks to something of /philía/, but . . .
. It says nothing of friendship itself" [8]), it nevertheless
describes a friendship, "friendship itself," true friendship, that
would have to contend with two equally perplexing alternatives:
the seeming impossibility of two active parties without any object
for that activity, two parties loving each other without being
loved one by the other; or a friendship that remains one-sided or
lopsided, where only the active party is defined as a friend.
Indeed, still following Aristotle, a true friendship would be one
that was lopsided to the extent of preferring love for the dead or
departed. The activity of friendship that makes true friendship,
dependent as it is on the breath of a living, active soul, is, at
the outside (an outside that becomes its innermost possibility),
dependent upon death and mourning: "Friendship for the deceased
thus carries this /philía/ to the limit of its possibility. But at
the same time, it uncovers the ultimate motive of this
possibility. . . . I could not love friendship without engaging
myself, /without feeling myself in advance/ engaged to love the
other beyond death. Therefore, beyond life" (12). It therefore
looks as though the Aristotelian logic has reversed the supposed
reciprocality of friendship to make it unilateral or
unidirectional, and substituted a dead object for its living one.
14. Nietzsche, in typical fashion, gives his own series of twists to
the question. The first is that of volume one of Human All Too
Human, where, as a riposte to the dying sage's "Friends, there are
no friends!" the living fool retorts "Foes, there are no foes!"
(148-49, 274). For Derrida, the reversal constituted by this
inversion or conversion, a simple substitution of the foe for the
friend, "would perhaps leave things unaltered" (175). Another
version, that of the "good friendship" described in the Assorted
Opinions and Maxims, involves instead a more complicated "rupture
in reciprocity or equality, as well as the interruption of all
fusion or confusion between you and me" (62). But when Nietzsche
writes in honor of friendship in The Gay Science, it is by means
of a fable of a Macedonian king and an Athenian philosopher and is
articulated through the logic of the gift, with all the
disproportion or impossibility of any equilibrium of giving and
receiving that that implies (72). Derrida refers to such a rupture
as "a new twist, at once both gentle and violent," one that "calls
friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymmetry or to
disproportion" (63) and whose stakes are high, for it leads him
directly into the heart of the aporetic "madness" of the chance of
friendship, as of decision, justice and democracy.
15. Once again, as it were beyond the reversals uncovered in the
maxim, or in Aristotle or Nietzsche, Derrida enacts something of a
reversal of his own with respect to the disjunctions or
dissymmetries at work in the elaborations of friendship he is
analyzing. And this takes place precisely with respect to the
distinction between friendship and love, along the faultline
separating /philía/ from /eros/ (to the extent that one can
presume that to be the distinction between friendship and love, to
the extent that love can be conceived of as non-erotic) in any
case, in the trembling of those differences. As we have just seen,
he underlines what, in certain cases at least, appears undeniably
as the disjunctivity and dissymmetricality of friendship. But
then, in the context of his analysis of the other possible version
of Aristotle's or Diogenes's maxim, he calls upon that very
disproportionality to distinguish love from friendship:
The request or offer, the promise or the prayer of an 'I love
you', must remain unilateral and dissymmetrical. Whether or
not the other answers, in one way or another, no mutuality, no
harmony, no agreement can or must reduce the infinite
disproportion. . . . Here, perhaps, only here, could a
principle of difference be found--indeed an incompatibility
between love and friendship . . . supposing such a difference
could ever manifest itself in its rigorous purity. . . .
Simply put, friendship would suppose . . . the /phenomenon/ of
an appeased symmetry, equality, reciprocity between two
infinite disproportions as well as between two absolute
singularities; love, on the other hand, would raise or rend
the veil of this phenomenon . . . to uncover the disproportion
and dissymmetry as such. . . . when one names the friend or
enemy, a reciprocity is supposed, even if it does not efface
the infinite distance and dissymmetry. As soon as one speaks
of love, the situation is no longer the same. (220-21,
translation modified; Politiques 248-49)
The logic here is complicated, and sets up a reverberating
reversal between two sides of an opposition that functions as if
in permanent imbalance, like some spinning machine that causes the
whole apparatus to wobble. Love is unilateral whereas friendship
is less radically dissymmetrical. Friendship presents a
reciprocity where two infinite disproportions have made peace
(/une réciprocité apaisée/), whereas, for its part, love rends the
very veil of dissymmetry. But this difference, or indeed
incompatibility between love and friendship, is itself "appeased"
inasmuch as the rigorous purity of the difference between the two
cannot be presumed. It is as if between love and friendship there
were either a relation of love (disproportion or incompatibility)
or of friendship (appeased reciprocity), and so on into the abyss,
for each of the terms subdivides within itself /ad infinitum/.
16. But Derrida's reversal here is radical in another way. If love
/is/ to be distinguished from friendship, he maintains that it
will be in terms of the question of reciprocity. As a result, "I
love you" is spoken into a type of void, performed as a promise or
prayer to which one cannot expect an answer. We might therefore
imagine it turned around to the extent of being uttered from
behind, so that even were one to proffer a response, even a
symmetrical "I love you (too)," it would also be spoken into a
type of emptiness in front of one. Derrida seems to suggest that
it is only by means of the disproportionality of love that
friendship can be taken out of a Schmittian schema of amity and
enmity and liberated from that version of the political; only by
that means can one gesture toward a different politics, one of
promise. But, if my analysis of his logic is correct, this will
mean preserving and at the same time breaking down the distinction
between friendship and love, dragging friendship, as it were
kicking and screaming, across an abyssal incompatibility that is
perhaps not rigorously pure, and into the dissymetricality of
love. I doubt one could successfully choreograph such a rhetorical
pirouette without having it teeter like an imbalanced spinning
top, and fall. But any attempt to do so, and any movement toward a
new politics informed by either love or friendship or both, would
necessarily involve, like a fleeting glimpse or a languid caress,
a relation of front to back. There at least one could begin to see
friendship and wait for love in terms of a dissymmetry that did
not for all that fall into an impossible contortion.
17. A twist or turn, even a torsion, without for all that being an
impossible contortion. That would be the risk and wager of a
politics of friendship that reckons with the dorsal. So it is also
with the practice of deconstruction. We will have spent our
professional lives trying to account for the difficult protocols
of intervention within textual form and substance undertaken by
such a reading practice, trying to determine what particular
twists Derrida gives to the texts he is examining, how and to what
extent he either identifies or "causes" the effects of stress on
the basis of which the text says, is heard, let, or made to say
more than it wants to. Since the exorbitance of the methodological
question raised with respect to the analysis of Rousseau in Of
Grammatology we have had those questions before us. This essay
has, up to this point, operated on the basis of certain
presumptive answers to those questions, purporting to distinguish
between turns or reversals that can be identified as relying on
the rhetorical gestures of here an Aristotle, there a Nietzsche,
there a Derrida.
18. However, there appears to be a surplus of methodologically
reflective moments in Politics of Friendship, and a multiplication
of forms borrowed by such moments in the text. Most obvious, even
if only typographically--no small thing, however--are the multiple
parentheses, emblematic of a variety of interruptions, glosses and
diversions, interventions that can only be described, in the
context of this discussion, and of the book, as "apostrophic." I
am referring here only to those parentheses that are set apart in
the text as separate paragraphs, there where the normal flow of
the text is interrupted by a smaller or larger section that
appears within parentheses. There are also any number of
parentheses doing what one might suppose to be normal duty within
the text, adding short clarifications with minimal disruption to
the reader. At one point, following a slew of those putatively
minor or everyday parenthetical insertions, Derrida writes, "And
let's not talk about the parentheses, their violence as much as
their untranslatability" (221, translation modified). Given that
reference to violence and untranslatability, and since, in the
final analysis, the everyday parentheses differ only in size and
not in kind from the larger inserted paragraphs or sets of
paragraphs, we would have to remark the structural violence of any
parenthetical insertion as a preface to what I am about to develop.
19. The larger, "apostrophic" parentheses begin in the Foreword with a
polylogue of four discursive units (x), and continue throughout
the text, ranging in length from a single line (70) to twelve
pages (in the French) (Politiques 178-88) or more (I'll come back
to that "or more" in a moment). I counted twenty-six of them. Two
of them use (square) brackets rather than (round) parentheses, and
one of those says as much, although it imputes them, syntactically
at least, to Montaigne, something that gets lost in translation.[5
<#foot5>] Their content varies enormously and it is difficult to
determine the precise logic that justifies them. Sometimes they
constitute digressions that are perhaps too long for a footnote,
but that has never been an objection for Derrida in the past.
Sometimes they are reminders of previous points in the discussion,
sometimes openings to other questions. Some of them, uncannily,
deal with the question of the female friend or the sister to whose
exclusion or marginalization from philosophical discussions of
friendship the book explicitly wants to draw attention.
20. Still others, and these are the ones that interest me most, fall
into the category of "questions of method" /à la/ Grammatology.
Thus there is the reference to the "respect" for Aristotle that
nevertheless involves "some slow, discreet or secret drift" (13)
that I quoted earlier. In the following chapter there appears a
similar admission of a complicated logic of fidelity to Nietzsche:
"(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" (33). At a
particularly apostrophic moment in Chapter 3, Derrida declares
"that is all I wanted to tell you, my friend the reader" (70).
And, much later, he inserts a perhaps unnecessary reminder that
"we have not privileged the great discourses on friendship so as
to submit to their authority . . . but, on the contrary, as it
were, to question the process and the logic of a canonization . .
. . /paying attention to what they say and what they do. This is
what we wish to do and say/" (229, emphasis added). Such
meta-discursive glosses, however, do not always appear within
parentheses, that is to say as interventions circumscribed by a
pair of conventional, round diacritical marks. Indeed, not only is
there extensive explanation of the methodological protocols in
play throughout the analysis of the /repli/ version of "O my
friends," but one needs to ask whether, following Derrida, one
could ever hope to distinguish rigorously between the constative
and performative elements of any commentary--indeed any
text--distinguishing what it says in general, and what it says
about what it is doing in particular, from what it does. As we
just read, Derrida does or says both (what he says and what he
does) in the same breath.
21. Or in a slightly different breath. The matter of the two versions
of the "O my friends" maxim turns precisely on the question of
breathing, of aspiration, and of the diacritical textual
intervention--a subscript iota--that would mark the same in the
Greek: "it all comes down to less than a letter, to the difference
of breathing" (209). On the basis of the way a single omega is
written, with or without the subscript iota denoting an aspirate,
a whole philosophical tradition can be reassessed, including, one
has to presume, its distinction between constativity and
performativity. On the basis of what Derrida earlier calls "a
philological sidetracking" (177)--in French /un mauvais aiguillage
philologique/ (Politiques 201), bad directions, bad shunting, bad
philological flight control, an inattentive switch from one track
or corridor to another--there is potential accident and
catastrophe. But we have to understand that almost imperceptible
difference as also a formidable chance, the chance of a whole
other text, a whole other reading, and a whole other tradition for
the questions, for friendship and politics. By the time Politics
of Friendship gets to it, therefore, it is difficult to tell who
is taking credit for it, and that can perhaps no longer be the
question:
The time has perhaps come to decide the issue [/trancher/]. .
. . a tiny philological /coup de théâtre/ cannot prevail in
the venerable tradition which, from Montaigne to Nietzsche and
beyond, from Kant to Blanchot and beyond, will have bestowed
so many guarantees on the bias of a copyist or a rushed reader
by, without knowing it, staking a bet on a tempting, so very
tempting, reading, but an erroneous one, and probably a
mistaken one. Luckily for us, no orthographic restoration or
archival orthodoxy will ever damage this other, henceforth
sedimented archive, this treasure trove of enticed and
enticing texts which will always give us more food for thought
than the guard-rails to whose policing one would wish to
submit them. No philological fundamentalism will ever efface
the incredible fortune of a brilliant invention. For there is
here, without doubt, a staggering artifact, the casualness of
an exegetical move as hazardous as it is generous--indeed,
abyssal--in its very generativity. Of how many great texts
would we have been deprived had someone (but who, in fact?)
not one day taken, and perhaps, like a great card player,
deliberately feigned to take, one omega for another? Not even
one accent for another, barely one letter for another, only a
soft spirit [/esprit/, breath, aspirate] for a hard one--and
the omission of the subscript iota. (207-208; Politiques 234)
22. If I have quoted this paragraph almost in its entirety, it is
because, if space permitted, I would dearly love, passionately, in
and beyond friendship, to compare it with those famous pages on
Rousseau from Of Grammatology (157-60), to see how far
deconstructive reading practice had or had not evolved over the
preceding thirty years of its history, and to assess the current
/rapport de forces/ between "philological fundamentalism" and
"invention." But that will have to keep. Suffice to emphasize here
that the glosses that punctuate or /apostrophize/ the analysis of
the /version de repli/--"where are we heading?" (214), "does one
have the right to read like this?" (216), "it is . . . [the
temptation] of the book you are reading" (218), "our objective was
not to start down this path" (220)--have to be considered to be as
much a part of the analysis as the rest. Perhaps they are the very
constative part of it, to the extent that they deal with the
question of analysis as analysis, and perhaps an analysis that
does not deal with its own status, that simply presumes to be able
to (con)state, reduces to a pure performative. In any case, those
glosses, along with the abyssal twists, torsions and openings,
that go all the way from an almost inaudible "_i " to lengthy
parenthetical /excursus/, inhabit finally the same structural
space of possibility, the same rhetorico-political space as the
"risk," chance or wager of the "/perhaps/" and more properly
philosophical questions--event, /aimance/--around which Derrida's
text turns. All such questions derive from minute but
uncontrollable textual ruptures, intersecting apostrophically with
the secrets or silences of philological chance or accident, with
the brilliant inventions of an insignificant stroke of the pen,
the slight torsion or curvature of a line that produces or
introduces the beginning of a parenthesis of untold promise.
23. The "/perhaps/," for example, emerges from Nietzsche's Human All
Too Human and is first developed in the second chapter, whose
title ("Loving in Friendship: Perhaps--the Noun and the Adverb"
[26]) suggests that it again opens a faultline between love and
friendship. It is presented from the beginning as something to
which we must be particularly sensorially attentive: "Let us prick
up our ears [/Tendons l'oreille/] . . . towards this /perhaps/,
even if it prevents us from hearing the rest" (28; Politiques 45).
The "/perhaps/" is then described as an "unheard-of [/inouïe/],
totally new experience" (29; Politiques 46), where the adjective
/inouïe/ refers, in its literal sense, even more directly than
does the English "unheard-of" to the impossibility of being
perceived by the organ of hearing. Finally its operation is said
to depend on its "hold[ing] its breath" in order to "allow what is
to come to appear or come" (29), making the /perhaps/ perhaps
comparable to a quasi-inaudible aspirate. At the least we could
say that it relates to what is on the edge or outside of earshot
and of vision ("prick up our ears . . . allow what is to come to
appear"). Now if we were to try to figure or configure that
according to our choreographic principle, we would have to imagine
its occurring by means of a friendship or love relation that was
other than the simple face to face, yet not so fractured as not to
constitute a relation. It would be a function of friendship or
love that operated in or across a type of sensorial
/peripherality/, something that could occur once ears and eyes
were required to deal with what was taking place outside of their
normal frontal hemispheric field, once they had to deal with what
comes from behind, required to see, listen to, indeed feel--like
uneven breathing on the nape of the neck--what is dorsal.
24. It would be quite a turnabout. For not only does the perhaps
interrupt and disjoin "a certain necessity of order," but "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" (29). The /perhaps/, to say the least, turns
things around, and perhaps changes everything. It is said here to
occur to Nietzsche "in the upheaval of a reversing catastrophe"
(30), and is later referred to as a "catastrophic inversion" and
"reversing /apostrophe/" (50). The word translated as "reversing"
in both cases just mentioned is /renversante/ (Politiques 48, 69),
suggesting in the first place a radical overturning, but including
overtones of disorientation, change in direction, backwards
movement (for example, in the expression /tête renversée/, head
bent back as in ecstasy, or /écriture renversé/, writing that
slopes backward). For Derrida also says explicitly that he is
talking about "something other than a reversal [/renversement/]"
(31; Politiques 49).
25. Perhaps then, a catastrophe that is also a chance, an apostrophe
that overturns without for all that simply reversing. Both
"catastrophe" and "apostrophe" should be heard in more than one
sense: a climax or cataclysm but also a change in poetic rhythm or
stress, an interruption in favor of a single addressee but also an
ellipsis. Some minimal thing that changes everything in the
context of a philosophical discussion of love and friendship
marked by persistent parenthetical attention to its methodological
principles, that would seem to be what we are looking for as we
read Politics of Friendship. On the basis of that, let me try, if
not to draw a conclusion, to draw something in conclusion.
26. As I previously made clear, apostrophe as discursive interruption
and readdress is a conceit of "Envois" in The Post Card, playing
as that text does across the face-off between a singular private
loved one [/toi/] and just any reader [/vous/]. But apostrophe as
punctuation that represents a textual omission also functions in
"Envois" by means of the blank spaces in the text whereby, one
might suppose, the most intimate pieces of the correspondence, the
most apostrophic apostrophes remain undisclosed, excised,
censored. As a result of that, perhaps, there is a parenthesis in
"Envois," about which I have written at length elsewhere, that
opens but never closes.[6 <#foot6>] But the possibility of the
text's being irremediably or irredeemably opened already exists as
soon as there is apostrophe, or any /punctuation/ whatsoever.
Indeed, any mark whatsoever, any barely inaudible breathing effect
whatsoever. The principles of iterability, detachability, and
substitution which determine that fact are explicitly repeated, in
formulations echoing very closely those of "Signature Event
Context," within the analysis of the /version de repli/ discussed
above: "every mark has a force of detachment which not only can
free it from such and such a determined context, but ensures even
its principle of intelligibility and its mark structure--that is,
its /iterability/ (repetition /and/ alteration)" (216). And, as
develops a couple of pages further along (219), iterability also
means undecidability, the motor and fulcrum of Derrida's ethics
and politics.[7 <#foot7>] So this is no ordinary or simple nexus.
Everything hinges on it.
27. One reason I have kept on reading Jacques Derrida's writing since
1980 is in the hope of finding an end to the parenthesis he opens
in The Post Card. And I would like to think that the reason he has
kept on writing has been because he has been looking for just the
right place to bring it to a close. So I was heartened to see the
multiplication of parentheses in Politics of Friendship and I
searched carefully for an amicable end to the violence of that
moment from The Post Card. I searched for a westward-facing arc to
match the easterly one of the text from fifteen-odd years before,
for the closure of two parenthetical faces, face to face and
smiling like an e-mail abbreviation, to resolve the unilateral
challenge or ultimatum of that opened parenthesis. Instead, sadly,
I am faced with a serious case of recidivism. On page 58 of
/Politiques de l'amitié/, Derrida opens a parenthesis and writes
"Let's leave this question suspended" (/Politics/ 38). He never
closes it. The English translation follows the French to the
letter, or at least to the absence of a ")." Suddenly the "(" of
1980 is inexorably drawn in to the context of the "(" of 1994. Two
massive bodies of text slide into some sort of compromising
position. There they are, henceforth, for me at least, side by
side, or rather front to back, "( . . . (."
28. I'm tempted to say that they come to exist in /aimance. Aimance/,
which is somewhat unfortunately translated as "/lovence/," is a
term Derrida borrows from Abdelkebir Khatibi (7) to deconstruct
the opposition between love and friendship, between passive and
active, to mean something like "lovingness." Unable to "take place
figurelessly" (69), it is said to "cut across . . . figures" (70),
to be "love in friendship, /aimance/ beyond love and friendship
following their determined figures, beyond all this book's
trajectories of reading, beyond all ages, cultures and traditions
of loving" (69). The gesture of two unclosed parentheses is thus
made, in the first place, towards a figure of that sort of
lovingness. But it is also, obviously, a figure of catastrophic
inversion, a disruption of the symmetry and closure of a love or
friendship that is presumed to function only in the face-to-face,
and which therefore remains open to the politics of enmity
presumed by a Schmitt. For that figure to be fully drawn, there
would have to be more specific reference to an erotics of
corporality such as I have just been suggesting, a
problematization that extended not just to the distinction between
friendship and love, but, presuming it is not already implied, to
that between /philía/ and /eros./ In contrast to the face to face,
the back to front relation, or embrace, is more difficult to
conceive of outside of an erotics; the rhetoric of its figural
pose cannot but refer, at least in part--both because of the
version of intimacy it represents, and because of its trangressive
turn--to a carnal embrace.
29. I would argue that Derrida allows for that in the very
metadiscursive parenthesis without parentheses within his analysis
of the /version de repli/ where he speaks of the violence and
untranslatability of parentheses (221). The parentheses he is
referring to might as well be the two I have just brought into
proximity across the texts of The Post Card and Politics of
Friendship; their proximity might be said to draw a figure of
them, of their very violence and untranslatability. For, as I have
already pointed out, the same paragraph in which he refers to them
comes back to the unilaterality and dissymmetry of the "I love
you" that was said to perhaps be the only difference between love
and friendship, the interruption of reciprocity that must imply
some turning, some /détournement/ of a presumed face to face of
the same.
30. That would be the force of an "I love you" spoken from behind. It
would involve a catastrophic turning "towards" the other that
means turning one's back, something like the passive decision that
Derrida describes at length (68), a patience in no way reducible
to passivity, an /act/ of trust that lets the other come in the
figure of /surprise/ that one might contrast with the economics of
an appropriative /pre-emption/ that, we are reminded only too well
these days, is increasingly the single permissible version of
political discourse and practice. This love, friendship, and
politics of dorsality would also involve the principle of
substitutability; it comes to function immediately anything like
an "I love you" is proffered, immediately a singularity of address
is determined, immediately the supposed general discursivity of
the text is interrupted, a parenthesis opened, immediately there
is any apostrophic turning whatsoever: "would the apostrophe ever
take place, and the pledge it offers, without the possibility of a
substitution?" (5). Turning one's back allows the other to come as
other to the other, as other other, as another other.
31. And so this love, friendship, and politics of dorsality is finally
what I'll dare to call a love, friendship, and politics of
prosthesis in order to allow for the scandal or chance of a love,
friendship, and politics of the inanimate. A prosthetic politics
that would perhaps be more productive a concept than a
posthumanist politics. From the beginning of Derrida's book,
friendship has had to be understood within the structure of
/revenance/ and /survivance/, of spectrality and inanimation.
Derrida refers to a "convertibility of life and death" (3), to the
fact that, after Aristotle, "one can still love the deceased or
the inanimate," and that it is through the possibility of such
loving--whose directionality I am letting turn here so as not to
limit it--that "the decision in favour of a certain /aimance/
comes into being" (10). And again, in the same passage where the
incompatibility of love and friendship is described in terms of
the dissymmetry I have been insisting on, Derrida writes of the
"non-assurance and . . . risk of misunderstanding. . . . in not
knowing /who/, in not knowing the substantial identity of /who/
is, prior to the declaration of love" (220), which I read also as
not knowing the substance that distinguishes the identity of a
/who/ from that of a /what./ And finally, at the end, we are asked
"to think and to live the gentle rigour of friendship, the law of
friendship /qua/ the experience of a certain ahumanity" (294).
32. A prosthetic love and friendship, erotics and politics should be
understood as something different from a raising of the stakes of
non-identity or de-subjectivation, different from taking things
beyond the human, even beyond the animal, to the inanimate.
Prosthesis refers for me not to the replacement of the human by
the inanimate but to the articulation of one and the other. So
such a love and friendship, erotics and politics would, as we saw
to begin, break with the naturalness of the supposed homogeneity
of those concepts; it would, from the perspective of an always
already prosthetic, allow us to begin to think the subject of love
and friendship, erotics and politics in its biotechnological
becoming, to think the radically inconceivable otherness of the
other as coming upon and coming to bear upon, a being let come
upon and let come to bear upon the sameness of a presumed
reciprocal relation; and it would be the trust required to let
that come, behind one's back, unable to be known, in the
confidence of an unrestricted hospitality, in a fiduciary relation
reaching toward or arching back upon the possibility of a
friendship and a politics at once /unheimlich/ and /aneconomic./
Such a love and friendship, erotics and politics would encourage
us to think detachment, substitution, dissymmetry, disjunction,
letting come the interruption of an apostrophic or parenthetic
reversing catastrophe, the figure of a double /retrait/ in
torsion, ((, a coupling, if that is what it is, whose only ending
would be another opening, to another.
English Department and Department of Languages, Literatures, and
Cultures
University at Albany, State University of New York
DWills@uamail.albany.edu
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. Further references to the English translation will be
included in parenthesis in the text, preceded where necessary by
the mention "Politics," and in some cases followed by reference to
the French original (Politiques).
2 <#ref2>. Earlier in the project from which this work is
extracted, I analyze the "dorsality" of Lévinas's ethical
relation, and before that Heidegger's work on technology. The
latter appears as "Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality."
3 <#ref3>. In French, "/Replis./" See my discussion below.
4 <#ref4>. Comparisons can be made between the figure of
apostrophe favored by Derrida and the Althusserian
"interpellation," that moment or structure of the constitution of
the subject as ideological and political, something I develop in
the final chapter of the forthcoming Thinking Back.
5 <#ref5>."[Convenance, inconvenance. Digression. /Soit dit entre
crochets, Montaigne/ tire la plus audacieuse et la plus
incontestable consequence . . ." (Politiques 203, emphasis added).
Inelegantly preserving the French syntax, this would transliterate
as: "[Suitability, unsuitability. Digression. Said/speaking, as it
were, within brackets, Montaigne draws the most audacious and the
most uncontestable consequence" Cf. /Politics/ 178: "[A digression
here, remaining between square brackets, on suitability,
unsuitability. Montaigne draws the most audacious and the most
uncontestable consequence."
6 <#ref6>. See my Prosthesis 286-318.
7 <#ref7>. Cf. "Signature Event Context." For discussion of
iterability/undecidability as aesthetics/ethics nexus, see
"Lemming," in my Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
---. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London:
Verso, 1997.
---. Politiques de l'amitié. Paris: Galilée, 1994.
---. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan
Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
---. "Signature Event Context." Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan
Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 307-30.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Josephine Nauckhoff.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
---. Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. R.J.
Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
Wills, David. Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2005.
---. Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
---. "Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality." Parallax
10.3 (July-September 2004): 36-52.